Fawn Magazine Website Progress

After much frustration and hours of work I have finally produced the basic structure and design for the Fawn Magazine website. 

Below is a snapshot of the Wordpress theme I used as a base to design my theme, and under that is a sneak peak of the Fawn Website home page.

I implemented my own HTML and CSS coding into the original theme to create this design. The black sections are for proposed banner advertisements.

NU BLU THEME

FAWN MAGAZINE THEME

Q-Man Website

This website was created for a project I was working on last trimester. We were split into teams of around 6 people and were asked to create and market a game level for Little Big Planet 2 on the Playstation.

I took on the role as Marketing Director and Web Designer. For this I needed to design and produce a website for the game level.

Our game was based on Qantm College. I wanted this to be reflected in the layout and colours of my design. I found this project very rewarding as it greatly improved my HTML and CSS coding skills. I also taught myself to make a flash based image gallery for the game screenshots. 

I have included a snapshot of the Qantm College website below for reference, as I was basing the style of my design on this.

 

 

Dandy Dukes Invitation

I created this invitation as a part of an ongoing design project last trimester. We worked in team of two and created and marketed a product using digital design methods. 

My team's product was Dandy Dukes bow ties, a range of quirky bow ties for the modern man. A personal friend of mine was our client and we worked with her to develop a marketing strategy and promotional material that would suit the image of her brand.

The brand itself seemed to take on quite a retro feel, and I wanted this to be reflected in the design of this invitation.

Music Poster Illustration

For this brief I chose to create posters for the Black Cherry Rockabilly Festival and Josh Pyke's Lighthouse Tour. The first being a poster based on airbrushing techniques, while the later was to be a stylised design. Below is the brief.

BRIEF
You are required to create 2 styles of Illustration for 2 music posters. The visual and written content must be different in both posters.

1. Project
The client requires an illustration based on the technique of gradients (Airbrushing in Photoshop - Gradients in Illustrator). You are also expected to design the poster using illustration and typographical elements only. Do NOT use any photographic elements in the final design. Photoshop and Illustrator are the only programs that can be utilised.

2. Project
The client requires an illustration rendering based on the process of stylisation. The illustration should not look realistic. This poster is also expected to be designed using only illustration and typographical elements. Do NOT use any photographic elements in the final design. Photoshop and Illustrator are the only programs that can be utilised.

Printing Methods Brochure

The purpose of this brochure was to demonstrate our knowledge of the correct procedures associated with print design and printing. We were asked to demonstrate our knowledge in brochure form in a style of our choice. 

 

 

 

 

Fashion Palette Brochure

For this brief I was required to choose a company of my choice and design a gatefold brochure for them. I chose to design a brochure for Fashion Palette as I am passionate about fashion and I think it is a great event. Below is the brief.

BRIEF
Design a Gate-fold brochure for a client. The brochure is double-sided and will only use PANTONE colours. The client is on a tight budget and has restricted the colours to only 2 PANTONE colours.

Fawn Magazine - Week 10

This week I conducted a lot of design based work, focusing largely on the Fawn Magazine master style sheets as well as implementing the website into a Wordpress theme.

I completed my sketches for the master style sheets this week which meant that I running a bit behind schedule on my Gannt chart. I did not think it would take as long as it did to sketch each section, but I wanted to make sure that every page had an interesting design layout different to the other pages. I found because I was trying to make each page relatively different it was harder to come up with a constant flow of ideas for these designs. I spent a lot of time researching magazines that I feel have similar design styles to what I wanted to achieve so that I could take inspiration from how they had styled their pages. For each section I sketched between 2 to 4 options so that I was able to work with a style that would work cohesively with the rest of the magazines pages.

After completing the layout sketches I then moved onto working on implementing these sketches into Indesign. Initially I thought it would take around 3 weeks to do this, however I now think it may take a little longer as constructing the website is exhausting my weekly time allocation as it is more challenging than I originally thought it would be. I developed a Indesign document mapping out the pages that will appear in the magazine, and have been slowly implementing my layouts into the pages. So far I have completed the Contents page, Calendar pages, Job Review page, and Beauty Shoot pages.

Developing my website in Wordpress has proved a little more challenging than I had originally planned. I had developed my HTML code in Dreamweaver last week and started to implement it into a blank Wordpress theme. I was following a tutorial on Lynda.com to do this as it shows you exactly where to cut and paste your HTML code around the Wordpress PHP code. As I am using a blank Wordpress theme I am having trouble adding particular elements from my design into the theme, as I have no knowledge of PHP. This particularly relates to the search bar, mailing list and particular blog post style that I want to achieve, all which use PHP to operate. 

I discussed my design with Lance and he suggested I talk to another lecturer Leonard regarding customising a Wordpress theme, as he might be able to help me implement these features. I will be meeting with Leonard next week regarding my Independent Study project so I will discuss it with him then.

Lastly I discussed content ideas with one of my contributors Gaia. We went through each section and developed a list of what exactly we wanted each section to become as we developed it. As Gaia has written for various online publications having her expertise in this field is invaluable in producing appealing content for Fawn readers. We are both now searching for great news stories and products to put into the Fawn Loves spreads as well as any events that are scheduled for Summer 2012 for the Calendar spreads. We also set rough shoot dates but I am yet to confirm these dates with all the shoot talent.

JB

Fawn Magazine - Week 9

This week was spent heavily focusing on the creative design aspects of Fawn Magazine, as well as starting to write some of the editorial content.

I continued working on the layout sketches for Fawn which will help me design the final master style sheets in InDesign. I have been designing about 3 or 4 different options for each section that appears within the magazine. Doing so will give me greater freedom when I come to choosing the final pages for the layout to ensure that each page layout compliments the other layouts on surrounding pages.

After last week I was not happy with the final result of the style guide and layout I completed, so I spent some time experimenting with other fonts and layout styles. I finally found a combination of fonts that I was happy with and have decided to use this combination within Fawn. I am happy with my original colour scheme that was selected, so have decided not to change that.

After completing the style guide, I used this formula to create a layout for one of the spreads within the magazine. This layout in particular was for the Creative Job Review page and I wanted the design of the layout, the fonts and colour scheme, to be a good indicator of how the rest of the magazine will look. I really like my final layout and have gained client approval on it. The only changes that will need to be made are to the change numbers so that they are more cohesive with the rest of the page. Completing this page will help me design the rest of my master style sheets, as I will have a creative guide to work from.

As well as working on the design of the magazine itself, I also used this week to complete the final pages for my website and EDM Photoshop mockups. I'm really happy with the final design for the website, as it is easy to navigate and is a simple yet effective design. The design of the EDM mock up is very similar to that of the website, but has been redesigned slightly so that it is suitable for email. Now that I have completed the final designs for both the website and EDM I can begin to complete all pages in Dreamweaver.

I continued with a small amount of Dreamweaver this week, adding and changing things to the design as I finished the creative mock ups. Now that the mock ups are complete I can begin to finish all the HMTL and CSS elements in Dreamweaver, then focus on bringing the code from these documents into the Wordpress files.

Lastly I began researching questions for the Creative Job review page. I searched these online and found two really good sources for similar interviews that I will be conducting. The first was a post on the Sportsgirl website reviewing a freelance stylists job. The second was off the Dolly Magazine website, which has job reviews from all the staff members that work within Dolly. It was useful to see the responses for each question and how they differed from job to job even though the same questions were being asked. I have taken note of all the questions from these interviews and have started compiling my own list of suitable questions based on the research I undertook.

JB