I have learned much about how I want my magazine to look and how to set up my presentation through my classmates’ projects about ten different magazines, their covers, and their house styles. Each project talked about a different magazine and the unique features of their covers. Each of these features seemed to repeat themselves in order to set up a specific theme or “house style.”
As I watched the presentations, there were some magazines that stood out to me. One that particularly caught my eye was ESPN. I love how it had a minimalist design; I thought it was clean and polished. It made
me realize I want to go for a similar look for my magazine. The only thing I would add is more anchorage, like for example in
Rolling Stone. In fact, something I liked about
Rolling Stone is the masthead. It was always in the same place and more or less the same size, something that was not apparent in
ESPN. Additionally, it changed colors depending on the person, for example, when Migos was on the cover there was a bold red whereas when Emma Stone was on the cover there was a classy, feminine white. One magazine that I didn’t particular like was
WIRED. I realized that the way
WIRED lays out their cover is not what I am going for. I thought it was too chaotic and messy. There were texts that were overlapping in different sizes and I just thought it was too much. Another magazine from which I didn’t really get inspiration was
National Geographic. I thought that the yellow border of the magazine did not look appealing and it kind of ruined the rest for me. Overall, I realized that I want my magazine to not be busy and have a simple but bold look.
During the actual presentations of the magazines, I took note of a few things to do and to not do for my final presentation. One of the most important things I noticed when all the presentations were going on was that I must keep the audience’s attention. There were a few issues that lost my attention after a while. One of the big issues I experienced, even with my own presentation, is talking too much. After a while, the voice seems to drone on and on and the audience feels like they just want it to end. This happened with the first slide of the
Popular Science and with my own project about
Shape on the words slide. When I made that slide, I hadn’t even realized that I was talking for so long; so it just taught me that I must pay more attention to slides I make, maybe try seeing the presentation a couple of days after making it with a fresh brain. Another thing that kept popping up was that many groups would put a little too much text on the slides and then it would be distracting from what they were actually saying. On the other hand, something I really liked and took note of for my own future presentation was how in
The New Yorker presentation they mimicked the font of the masthead and overall their design changed and was interesting and nice to look at. Also there were some groups that used live narration and circled/pointed to certain pieces of the magazine as they talked about it, which in my opinion kept the audience engaged.
Overall, I think this project helped me set a vision for what I want my own project to look like. I also feel like I learned a lot from hearing other groups analyze different magazines and even from my own group’s presentation and the mistakes we made as well as the things we were complimented on. I like how we discussed each presentation afterwards, that helped me see other points of view or little aspects that I missed.
