Review: History of Design and Judging

I didn't quite realize their was going to be such a serious judging process involved in Tuesday's lecture until I got there. After being all thrown off by the snow days, I've been a little slow getting re-prioritized again, but what's new. I ended up choosing the swanky marijuana design done by Philadelphia Magazine. The color palette impressed me most with their feature design. I never thought of weed colors being so calming and vibrant, which I thought was a very interesting reaction. It was surprising and innovative. Being that it was such a potentially contentious story topic, the design did a great job of supporting the text while not being vulgar or intrusive.

After reading the History of Magazine Design, we were asked to come up with contemporary examples of some of the old-fashioned techniques we read about. It seemed to me like there were many, many similarities, as far as basics, staples and foundation design tactics, that continue to be used today. It's crazy to think how difficult it must have been for people in the early 1900s to work with page design and layout. My respects to them all. Here are my examples:

This example is from Nylon, one of my absolute favorites. This loud photo montage creates a visually pleasing department page that mimics the technique used in the following "Fetish" example from 1980. 

The designs are definitely not identical, but I thought they were very similar in the sense that both used photos and distorted the size of the figures and characters to create a focused illustration. The idea of using giant pictures to grab your reader is definitely still in use!

This example is also from "Nylon." The following is from a 1916 McClure's, and is my comparison to the above layout.

The columns and structure of the text and photos are very rectangular in both designs. "Nylon" even uses that geometrical design in the corner that stimulates the shape concept it's going for. The reading said that this McClure's example is reflective of the trend towards "logo type" for magazines. Each of these examples uses a boldly different type for their headlines, and a smaller version for their deck. Although it's not clear in the McClure's design, Owens also talked about the trend towards placing text on top of photos, or running them in some correspondence. Some of the earlier examples Owens features were so outrageously designed - text seemed to come from nowhere and images had no flow and were jarring, rather than informative. Using a structured grid like the examples above helps create a peaceful coexistence between text and photo, like Nylon achieves.

Although the above example is a studio shot, I thought it closely mirrored the following example done by Leslie's Weekly in 1903.

As discussed in the reading, this is one of the first examples of design in which a single shot was stretched across an entire page, notably the cover, then text was placed over it. Often, a photo can say a lot about the story you want to tell, and these two photos are the perfect simple shots that are clear and provoking.