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