Critique: Modern Midwest Prototype

As I made changes to my magazine prototype for my early morning presentation on Tuesday, the resource that helped me the most was the creative library. Having access to such a large database of photos that were usable was so helpful to me. It changed the entire appearance of the magazine because I was able to get rid of the hideous, pixelated images I was forced to use before. For the cover, especially, it helped me present a much better version of my concept.

When the publishing team e-mailed us their mission statement and story ideas, it sounded to me like that they wanted Modern Midwest to look trendy and young, but while still retaining a sense of sophistication and elegance. I wanted to push my design towards that goal of sophistication because I thought that would make the whole appearance look clean, fresh, and most importantly, modern.

The first change I made was to my logo. I sketched out a lot of my ideas and scoured over the books that Jan assigned us for the class, as well as some other design books I have on my bookshelves. I pulled ideas from all sorts of places and tried to be as original as possible. Here are all of the logo ideas I came up with:

Out of these options, I liked the yellow-boxed "M" example. I know it's hard to see at this size, but that one has the date above the M, then it says "modern midwest" directly below it, and below the name of the magazine is the tagline. The other two that I liked were the bottom two on the right side of the page. I thought these were the most fitting and achieved the overall concept I was going for. 

After I narrowed down my logo options, I started working on my cover design. I chose three different photos that captured different aspects of the magazine, including a human-interest side, nightlife, and food. I wasn't sure what the publishers wanted to focus the most on, so I decided I would give them 3 different cover examples that presented all the logo ideas as well as different feels to the magazine. 

I didn't make very many changes to my department page or feature spread. I only swapped out the photo I used for the feature spread. The one thing I wish I would have done was include a sidebar example for the department page. I wanted the publishers to know that I was going for a more sophisticated, edgy look, but I didn't want them to feel like a sense of humor and playfulness would be totally lost if they went with my concept. I feel like a sidebar would have lightened up the mood, broken up the text, and given them a more visually pleasing example, but I didn't think about the importance of including it until I was actually presenting. Not sure if that will hurt me, but it's good to keep all this in mind for the future! Here is my final draft of the Modern Midwest prototype:

Good luck to everyone on their magazine projects! I'm excited to see how everyone's designs turn out throughout the rest of the semester. I'm so grateful for this experience because I think it's going to be one of the most important portfolio and resume boosters we will have gained from this capstone.