CCR

Here is my Creative Critical Reflection for "The Fit" Magazine:

Making this magazine has been a journey, and I've poured my heart and soul into every piece of the magazine, blog posts, and CCR video. Although many times it was hard to know what to write a blog post about or have had several hours consumed by my magazine, I will miss this project!
I feel like I've been able to get creative in a way that I don't in other classes. My blog posts have been so cathartic in a way, and although I'm proud of my work, I'm sad to say goodbye.
Thanks for joining me on my journey!

Signing off for the last time,
Malena

Drum roll please..."THE FIT" MAGAZINE IS HERE

Hi guys!

So... Finally...the moment you've all been waiting for...after two months of hard work...

I present to you "The Fit" magazine!

Here is a link to my magazine when I uploaded to a website that makes it into an actual page-flipping magazine (so cool)

OR

Here is a link to my magazine on Canva

 

 

I've learned so much about not only the production of magazines but also about hard work! I hope you enjoy my magazine as much as I do! This project has been so much work but this class has been one of the most entertaining and one that makes me think creatively. Every project is a chance to get outside my comfort zone, with little directions to restrict my ideas, which is rare in high school. Thank you for following me along on this journey😄

Making the Double Page Spread

Hey guys!

Surprisingly, making the double page spread was one of the easiest parts of my magazine!
Here's how it went:

1) I first asked my sister to take a few pictures of me wearing one of my mom's jackets so that I could include it in the double page spread.



Looking back, I'm really glad to have put a picture of an example of how the jacket could be styled, but I wish I would have taken a picture of my mom to give the company and the story a face. 

2) I interviewed my mom while eating at Panera Bread. I didn't really have any exact questions, but there was a general idea:
-Did you know you wanted to work in the fashion industry when you were growing up?
-What obstacles did you overcome to be where you are now?
-How did you start out?
-What is one trait or characteristic do you think is important to have when trying to reach a goal?

My partners and I then came together with all our research and decided to go with a bold title with pops of color, 2 columns, and a little excerpt at the end of the double page spread that gave a little more information. 



We also decided to have the social media of the person being interviewed/the company being talked about in a little rectangle at the end of the article.

For the part that says "Ways to Wear Val's Creations", I took a few pictures of my mom's jackets with white cardboard as the background and a ring light:

 

I then took the pictures:

And deleted the background with an app called Superimpose:

I made little excerpts on how to style each jacket. 

Lastly, I  wrote the article and the double page spread was done!
I'm so glad that I added the last part about how to style the jacket because I feel like it can give the reader an idea about how the jackets could be worn, which I found a lot of fashion/beauty magazines do: they create possible outfits that the readers can try out. 

Singing out!
Malena

P.S.
My CCR is in progress!!

Next Up: Production Process for My Table of Contents

I’m back again! This time I’ll be talking about how I created the table of contents. I had previously shown in my blog a rough outline of what I wanted my table of contents to look like.

Well, let's just say this draft changed drastically (but for the better)!

I then drafted a new table of contents, which looked like this:

I was pretty happy with the outcome until I met with my group after spring break and had a sudden realization: the story names did not cover the full content of the magazine! (major oops) In other words, the TOC was not following the usual convention of beauty magazines of having 10-15 titles on each page of the table of contents. I had even seen this in my previous research!

So, I got to work fixing my table of contents. 

Like I did while working on my cover, I reviewed all the fonts and text sizes I used on each element of the TOC and compared them to my team members' so that we all had the same styles and layout. 

To fix my initial mistakes, I simply made the text size smaller, which allowed me to fit more story names. Not only did I change my whole first page of the TOC, but I also made a second page to accommodate names of stories that encompassed the 60 pages of the magazine. Initially, I had written down that there were around 47 pages, but I hadn’t taken into account that beauty magazines such as Marie Claire, Vogue, and Cosmo have around 60-70 pages in each edition. So, based on my research, I made my magazine 63 pages in length.
This is what resulted:

Before admiring the simplistic, clean aesthetic of the TOC, let’s break the page down.

In the beginning, I didn't have enough pictures to place four pictures on each page of the table of contents, but I realized I really liked that organization instead of just two pictures on each page. So I took my sister (again) and took a few more pictures of her jeans and her shirt. I'm so glad I ended up doing the four pictures on each page because it's so organized, simplistic, and easy to read, and so that the two pages have a uniform look. 

First TOC page:
Top left: Picture of my sister grabbing her hair is one that I took in Argentina that I mentioned in one of my blog posts.
Top right: This is a picture that my sister actually took of me in Markham Park, a park in my city. Catalina finally rebelled against my demands and told me that if I needed pictures so badly, that I should be the model. She also took a few more pictures of me:
   



Does the first one look familiar? It's because I used this picture for the second page of the TOC for a story about sunglasses. 

Bottom left: For this picture, I used a lot of research that I had written about on previous blog posts, and also based on my partners' (Valentina's and Catalina's) help!

This was my set up: 

   

I used a large ring light that my mom had to take pictures of some beauty products I had in my bathroom. I made sure to choose bottles that didn't have the brand name visible!

In my "cracking magazine photography" blog post, I had explained how magazines usually used a long, white seamless background to take pictures of products. To create this, I simply used a white printer paper and put my products on top of it.

Next, the picture that my sister took of me with the leaf over my face is one that we took in Miami when we took the initial cover picture.

Then, the pictures of the jeans and of the shirt are ones that I took of my sister when I realized I needed more pictures for the TOC. 

Here are a few more that I took that day: 

I made sure to keep in mind FRAMING in these pictures so that the sidewalk or the neighborhood gates couldn't be seen.

I'm actually really happy how all the TOC pictures turned out!

I then just created story names related to beauty and fashion to add to the pages. 

Whew! That was a long blog post.

Thanks for reading!

Malena

Leighty, K. (2019, March 07). DIY 1: How To Build Your Own Photo Studio On a Bootstrapped Budget. Retrieved from https://www.pixelz.com/blog/diy-1-build-photo-studio-bootstrapped-budget/

SURPRISE!

Drum roll, please…
So...I FINISHED MY MAGAZINE!

It wasn’t an easy road though! Yesterday I had no school because my school had a super testing day. So I took this day to focus intensively on working on my magazine. 

Almost at the finish line...

Let’s start from the beginning:

Like I said last time, I decided on this cover after I added the pictures I shot with my sister onto my cover layout: 

But, I found that the white coverlines did not stand out enough from the busy background, so they weren’t as readable as I liked. 

So, like I’ve been doing throughout this whole project, I started researching. Let me tell you, I looked everywhere!! I first looked for fonts that were bolder in the default Canva fonts, but I found none that followed the genre conventions of beauty magazines (which were mostly serif, elegant fonts based on online covers and the 30 magazines I had spread out over my desk) and that stood out against the background. I then upgraded to the Premium level of Canva, which I did by using the 30-day free trial. This allowed me to upload free fonts from a website called dafont.com. 

The website is really user-friendly, I've been using it since I was 10 years old for Powerpoint projects in school. It's important to note that when looking for a font to use for a project or business, that the font is labeled "free for personal use". Finding no fonts after searching up "magazine fonts" and "coverline fonts", I mostly searched for fonts under the "serif" section of the home page:

I then started playing around with bold fonts that I found on Dafont :

But again, this font didn't follow the conventions for other beauty magazines and didn't make the text stand out from the background. (I also played around with the colors a little to see what I liked). 

I also searched the web for "how to make text stand out from a busy background" and found this helpful video. On minute 1:05 it explains how you can create a copy of the text, color it black, and place it behind your white text. This will then create a dark shadow behind your text that contrasts the original white text:

                           

I was also inspired by this Vogue cover:

The coverlines have a slight black shadow around the white text to make them pop against the backdrop. 

So, I tried this out with my coverlines:

                                                  

And walla! I think it looks a lot better. I discussed this with my team members, and they told me they loved the idea and added the element to their cover. 

My group also agreed to use the font "Vogue" for the masthead, which we thought best represented the conventions of beauty magazine mastheads (professional and with serifs). So we all downloaded the font and uploaded it onto Canva to use. 

As for post-production editing on the cover image, I just added a little contrast, saturation, and brightness. (I'm not sure why her face looks orange in this picture, but it's not orange in Canva!)

Tini also found a website that makes custom barcodes, so Catalina made a barcode for all of us and I added it to my cover with the same dimensions as my partners. 

Next blog post I will talk about how I created my table of contents, ad, and finally the double page spread. 

Will be writing soon,
Malena

A Guide on How to Design a Magazine Cover that Will Stand Out. (2016, October 08). Retrieved from https://naldzgraphics.net/how-to-design-magazine-cover/

24 HOUR CHANGES

Hello guys! So I have several updates…

I had to be honest with myself and I realized that I needed to take a new cover image. My two partners have a background of nature, and so I need to be consistent with that theme.

Right after school yesterday, I felt really productive so I forced my sister to come to take pictures with me. I visited my friend’s house, which has a really pretty golf course with huge palm trees and bright green fields, which is perfect for my magazine since it’s a summer edition. This time I took pictures with a professional camera (a Nikon D90) because when my sister took her pictures for her cover image, her pictures had really high definition and looked like an actual professional magazine image. I felt pretty sad that I had taken pictures in Miami for no reason, but I’ve been worried about my cover image for a while now, and I am glad to change it. I know I had told you guys that I was going to use an editing program to change the background in my original cover image, but let’s just say it was nearly impossible to get the wall to look realistic, since the lighting was different in all parts of the wall (like I mentioned in a previous blog post).

So! Let me tell you! It was an adventure taking pictures yesterday. We drove a little to the golf course, which they let you publicly use after the golf players leave (so that you won’t be hit by a ball!). Well, it was a little cloudy when I left my friend’s house, but the sky showed no signs of rain. Yet, when I get of my car, dress my sister, and walk to a nearby tree, guess what? It starts slightly raining! I told myself that I needed to keep going, but I was worried about my mom’s camera. So, I took a few more pictures and drove back to my friend’s house. When I got back, I checked the pictures out and felt like I needed more options. Long story short, we went back and forth between the golf course and my car avoiding the rain, but ultimately, I got a really awesome image! Here’s a little clip of me taking pictures of my sister (I swear she’s tired of me bossing her around):

Do you see and hear the little raindrops? I took pictures anyway...
Also! I want to reiterate again that the model may look like me, but it's actually my twin sister!! How can you tell us apart? I have a white birthmark on my lip and I'm slightly taller!

Here a few clothing items I brought for the shoot: 

Here is the location of the shoot:

I also want to say thank you to my mom for letting me use her jackets for the pictures and for letting me mention her company in my article! She's always been a big inspiration for me. 

So, without further ado, here are a few pictures that I took!

 
 

 

And then a few different pictures for that I had to take last minute for the table of contents:

  

After I took the pictures for the cover image, I was anxious to see how they looked on my magazine, so I got to work right away. At first, I was between these two covers:

 

But I ended up liking the picture on the right better because I loved the bright red colors on the jacket. I also asked my team mates and six other friends because I needed to see if it actually looked like a magazine cover to others, and they loved it, thankfully:

However! I was not done there. I realized that the white text did not stand out in the busy background of the palm trees. So, I tried a few things to fix it, which I will talk about in my next blog post!

I will also talk about:

-Editing my pictures

-Making my magazine style cohesive with my partners

-Writing my article

-Taking more pictures for the TOC

-How I based all my decisions on research

-Problems I encountered

-Starting my CCR script!

So buckle your seatbelts! It's going to be a bumpy ride (and long blog posts)!

Excited for the final result, 

Malena