Final Spreads

Through my design process I experimented with various different layouts and techniques, but throughout it all I kept in mind the image based layouts, using full page images and techniques like the golden section to show off the photography and make it stand out from the text. With the typography I used, I wanted to keep to a simple, thin, sans serif typeface for the header, I chose to use Helvetica Nueue. For the body copy I experimented with a contrasting Minion Pro, but found that keeping the same typeface was much nicer and brought a much cleaner, more modern look to the spreads. With my header, I found that white text looked much better, however it was lost in the image behind and I couldn’t resolve this without making the text very bold, which I didn’t like. So as not to lose the text, I placed a slightly opaque, grey box behind it to give a bit of a backdrop for the text to sit on and stand out from.

I continued to play around with the layout and the positioning of the imagery in the spread until I came to these final designs. I ended up having the separate images running off of the top and bottom of the pages as I thought this looked much better than having them stop at the margins. This links with the full page images and helps to tie the spreads together. For the box that the page number sits in, I colour picked the green from one of the woodland images. I really like my designs, I think they are very successful spreads and they clearly show off the photography of a very unique environment. Being a photography based magazine, I think the simplistic layouts and the image based design (inspired by examples like Communication Arts) works well and fulfils the brief. I think the imagery is very prominent and is not overpowered by the text, which is something that I knew I wanted from the start.

Being a print based design, I regularly printed my spreads to make sure they were working as a physical outcome, and not just on screen. I did this also for my final designs to see how they would look when finished and folded in the magazine. Personally, I think they are just as successful when printed, and nothing is lost thanks to printing the spreads regularly. I am happy with my final spreads and I think they successfully fulfil the brief by showing the photography of an environment in an exciting, clear outcome.

Contrasting Environments

One idea that I wanted to experiment with in this brief was contrasting environments and how I could show this through my photography. Something I wanted to try was mixing natural and urban environments. To do this I took two images, one of a very green, natural area and one of a grey, urban space, and cut them both in half to place them next to each other. Ideally I wanted to find images that could flow into each other, for example here the wooden walkway and the canal fit almost perfectly together which I think bring the images together and helps to present them as one image. I think this is a successful technique and I think it definitely show contrasting environments clearly and in an interesting way. However, I don’t think that the urban photographs I took are very strong and I don’t think there are many that could fit with the natural images as well as these two have. I also think that this might be too much for a magazine spread, and it may overwhelm the page, making it too busy and therefore harder to look at. Whilst I do really like this idea, I think I will stick with just photographing natural environments that I love to explore, as I also feel that idea is more personal and so I can put more into it. I will keep this contrasting environments idea in my head however, and I would love to revisit it another day, perhaps for another brief.

Grids & Layouts

Before I started putting together my final spreads, I wanted to sketch out some rough ideas of a few layouts that I was considering using. I wanted to go for very image based layouts, as it is a photography magazine and so I wanted the photography to be the main focus, with the text there to support it, rather than overwhelm it. One of the ideas that I definitely wanted to try using was to have an image fill a whole page of a spread. I have always thought that this was a very effective technique as it present the photography clearly whilst leaving some room for text, but not enough to overpower the image. I also like the idea of having this image run over to the next page creating a golden section. This is a popular technique as it shows the image well and creates a nice aesthetic on the page. This could also relate to photography itself, where the golden section very closely fits with the rule of thirds.

The 3×3 grid shows the rule of thirds. Ideally the areas that stand out in the image should sit along these lines or on one of the points where they intersect. This creates a more aesthetically pleasing image.

After deciding on a few layout ideas to experiment with I decided to start designing. I began by creating the initial grid to hang my design on. As the pages are square and there would be various images involved, I wanted to give myself some room to move things around and run things across multiple columns. Personally I like working in multiples of three, so I decided on a 6 column grid with 4mm gutters. I really liked the idea of having a lower top margin and leaving some space at the top of the page, so I made my top margin 14mm, whilst the rest are 10mm.

Environment Article

Heading: Into The Woods

Sell: “The ethereal quiet of the woods creates a peaceful space, which I believe is healthy for the soul.”

Words: 372

I recently took a few visits to the woods, bringing with me my camera and a strong will to explore and immerse myself in the outdoors. As a creative person, and one who loves to capture the world through the lens of a camera, the woods is, without a doubt, one of my favourite places to go.

There’s something about photographing in the woods that I can’t explain. Perhaps it’s the nature of the trees and the excitement of the unknown, or just the peaceful quiet that comes with the isolation of being in that environment.

I have always been drawn to the beauty and elegance of nature, and with each visit to the woods I would try to show this as much as possible through the photographs I take. I am drawn to the wonderful colours, the greens and browns, the overwhelming size of the trees, the knowledge that I don’t know what I will find. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to escape to the woods.

Growing up I loved running through the woods with my parents, exploring away from the path, always looking for something new and exciting, be it a fallen tree to climb on or an open clearing that lets the sun shine through to create a magical scene. I think this as a bag part of my love for the wilderness now, as I get a great sense of nostalgia when I’m exploring through the woods, and even today I still roam around looking for something new to catch my interest.

One of the best things to me about being in the wilderness is the detachment from the rest of the world that becomes evermore apparent the deeper into the woods you go. It is an incredibly unique environment, totally separate from the noisy, urbanised environment of much of the world. The ethereal quiet of the woods creates a peaceful space, which I believe is healthy for the soul. The atmosphere of being alone in the woods is truly calming, and I think has the power to lift any mood.

I personally am infatuated with the wilderness, and I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to escape to a natural, soothing environment like the woods.

Limpsfield/More Photos

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After the set of photographs I took at Bedgebury, I decided that I wanted to take some more photographs, documenting a more wild, untouched area of woodland. I knew about an area of deep, dark woodland in Limpsfield. I wanted to photograph deeper woodland, steering away from well kept areas of land and moving towards areas of pure nature that are untouched by man. I have fund that these areas are much more exciting environments as there is more wild, untamed growth and the things to be found are much more unexpected. I think these environments are much more fun to explore, and also offer a wider range of possibilities for adventuring and for photographic opportunities.

I think that the photographs I took this time around are much more exciting to look at as they show more wild areas. I also think that the colours and content of the images are much better. I much prefer the untouched aspect of these woods, as I feel it makes it look more wild, and more explorative. It also feels more disconnected with the modern world which truly makes this place its own environment to explore.

After taking my images, I again took to Photoshop to enhance the colours and contrast in them. Again taking inspiration from Kevin Russ, I wanted the deep greens and browns to stand out and contrast, along with the light and shadows that fill the scenes in my images. I am much happier with this set of photographs as I feel like they more clearly define the environment that I wanted to portray, and also relate more to the artists and styles that I have been inspired by.

Bedgebury – First Photographs

Bedgebury is a Pinetum located in Goudhurst and open all year round. It is filled with a range of different species of trees, and it is really a beautiful place to visit. I decided that it would be a good place to take my camera and photograph nature and the natural environment. When walking through the trees, I personally felt very calm and peaceful about being within that environment and just observing the wilderness. I also felt an overwhelming urge to explore and keeping walking further into the woods, with the hope of discovering something new and exciting.

In terms of the photographs I was taking, I wanted the sole focus to be on the environment itself, capturing incredibly tall trees, and beautiful scenes and landscapes where I could. Where a lot of the shots were taking underneath the trees and in shadows, it was difficult to get the right lighting and contrast but I tried my best to capture the environment in the best light I could. Remembering back to Kevin Russ and Kim Høltermand, I wanted to avoid having people in my images and I wanted to make them seem quite eerie and quiet, almost as if it is a forgotten environment, not visited by people for a long time. I found this quite difficult, where it is a very well kept place and everything is taken care of, although I feel I did get some successful imagery that certainly fits under the topic of environment.

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After sorting through the photographs I had taken and pulling out the ones that I liked, I went on to start editing some of them. I didn’t want to do too much to them, as I didn’t want them to appear to over edited. I just wanted to enhance the colours and contrast in the images to make them stronger, more exciting and, I think, more artistic. To do this I simply used tools such as Vibrance, Exposure, and Curves to increase the contrast and liven up the colours in the images. I think this has been successful and I think my edited images are much stronger than the originals. I also think that the edited versions will look much better in the magazine, and fit well with the simplistic layout that I want to experiment with.

Magazine Layout Examples

To get some more inspiration about page layouts and the way image and text can be arranged, I looked at some examples of existing magazines with very good imagery. The first is an issue of Creative Review. The first thing that I noticed is that the grid structure used throughout this magazine is fairly complex, with around 8 thin columns and lots of imagery of various sizes and text arranged around each other. There is a fair amount of text in this magazine, with about 50% text and 50% image on most pages. One thing that CR does well is using a large image as the background for a spread, placing text and sometimes other images over the top. This is a very interesting technique and I think it makes for a very strong page layout. It is something often used in magazines and I want to experiment with using it in my own spreads.

I also decided to look at Communication Arts, another, very image strong, visual communication magazine. I immediately found that the layout of this magazine was much simpler, where less imagery is used and also there is a much simpler grid structure. There only appears to be 2-4 columns, meaning the columns of text are quite wide and fit a lot more text in, although it often doesn’t look like it. There also appears to be a lot more white space in this magazine. Furthermore, there are only white backgrounds; no colour backgrounds are used and no images run across the spread as a background. The images in CA are also much more similar in size, which I think makes for a neater, more uniform design.

Personally, I am a big fan of simple, minimalistic design, and so the layouts in CA automatically appeal to me more. I think the use of white space and less complex text allows for the imagery to stand out more, which would be desirable in a photography based magazine. I will take inspiration from both magazines, and looking at both helped to show differences in layouts and designs within different magazines. However I like the design of CA much better, and I will aim to design my own magazine similarly, utilising white space, simple layout, and strong imagery.

Initial Thoughts

After having some time to think about the brief and different approaches to the topic of environment, I wrote down some of the ideas I was having. I considered ideas from all kinds of different aspects, thinking about huge scale environments both urban and natural, microscopic environments, and even personal environments, for example, someones bedroom or house.

Originally I wanted to try and steer away from the perhaps obvious ideas about environment such as global warming and nature. However, after thinking through some of these ideas, looking at some existing photographer, and also taking into account some of my own personal interests, I decided that I wanted to take a simpler, perhaps more obvious route. I absolutely love nature and going exploring out in the wilderness, and so I felt I wanted to capture this in my photography, as it fits perfectly with the topic of environment, and is an environment that I love to be in. Taking inspiration from photographers like Kevin Russ, I will go out and take imagery of natural, beautiful places that I find exciting to be in.

Kevin Russ

As another idea to keep in mind whilst shooting, I am also quite interested in the idea of contrasting environments, such as natural and urban ones. One thought I had was to split photos of contrasting environments in half, similar to the work of John Stezaker. I’m unsure of this idea but it is something I would be interested in trying I may experiment with this if I feel I can.

 

Finding Grids

To gain more understanding of grid structures in magazines and how they work through an issue I used this simple exercise, whereby I try to find the grid structure and draw it out. I took an issue of Creative Review and layered tracing paper over the top of one of the pages. Looking at the columns of text and alignment of the images, I tried to work how what grid structure was being used, looking at how many columns are used, the width of them, the gutter size and the margin sizes.

I found that the magazine used a 5 column grid with 5mm gutters between them. I chose the most complex looking page to start from, as this showed the columns more easily, whereas on some pages the text and image runs across multiple columns, making it harder to see exactly how many are used. After finding out this information I transferred the tracing paper to various other pages in the magazine, lining it up to see if the grid I had created fit with the rest of the magazine. I found that the structure I had created did fit into the rest of the magazine where all the text and imagery fit nicely inside the columns, even if some ran across multiples.

I found this task quite helpful, as it showed me how grids work the same throughout the same magazine, rather than using different structures for different pages. In finding this, I also think it has shown me that using the same structure throughout helps to bring the magazine together, whereas using different ones I think would make the spreads look to different, losing the style of the magazine. I also feel that in doing this, I have gained more appreciation of how much grids are actually used, and how important they are for layouts like this.