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