OUGD404: Studio Brief 2 - What is a Book? (Research)

To begin our research, we looked at current ongoing technology magazines and how they're typically designed e.g. what grids are used, binding methods, typefaces etc. to give us a good idea of what we'd be compared with, if hypothetically we were to actually release this magazine into the world.

Examples of existing tech magazines:

A lot of the magazines that are already on the market follow a similar trend, all have, for the most part, very busy looking front covers. The only ones really that tend to stand out are the ones with very bright, abstract colours and use of a bold typeface for the header, other than helvetica or something alike.

As much it's helpful to display the contents of the book on the front page briefly, both me and Matt realised that this isn't at all aesthetically pleasing. Given as well that they're all designed in the same way, none of them really do a good job standing prominent in a shelf full of similar designed magazines.

In our eyes, we think that maybe having a less cluttered front cover would actually be more effective in terms of attracting people's attention towards it. But would also make it a bit more ambiguous as to what the contents would be.

But the visual aesthetics of the magazine are only a small part of the design of the magazine, we need to establish a grid system to use within our publication to make our layout and content consistent throughout. To do this we looked into Müeller-Brockmann's 'Grid Systems in Graphic Design' to give us an idea of what we should go with.

The adaptation below (on the right) of the Golden Section canon is a grid layout is considered to be pretty effective as the box is not centred on the page and the margins are almost equal on all sides. This is something we thought about potentially adapting to fit to our needs within our publication.

With our magazine we wanted to change things up a bit and not go for a conventional look like most magazine generally would, where they all follow the same or very similar layouts and page styles. Brockmann stated that having the folio numbers on the inside margin does work, except the numbers must be slightly higher than the centre of the margin. But this is another little adjustment that we thought we could add in rather than going for the typical folio numbers on the outer margin of each page.

Example of Folio number on Inner margin

As much as we wanted to go for an unconventional look, something to bare in mind whilst we aim to do this is a point from Vignelli Canon 'Discipline is a set of self imposed rules, parameters within which we operate. It is a bag of tools that allows us to design in a consistent manner from beginning to end'. Essentially meaning that we need to keep a consistent look throughout the book without going overboard and swaying to more of a postmodernistic look. Vignelli also has several other points that we should keep in mind whilst designing, those being in relation to typeface sizing and relationship but others we aren't entirely sure of such as using double the paragraph's point size for headers and using solely flush left for paragraphs, we will aim to challenge and do differently.