Week 11: 10 Spreads

As I started to develop the rest of my magazine, I came to some realizations:

1. I cannot create art as fast as others. It is not my gift.

2. As an ex-car salesman, I can create words (well, stories to be precise) a lot faster, and use them to get people thinking.

3. My focus piece was an example of both: my slow pace at working with art and a desire to pull people into a discussion about something...not the artwork, but what the artwork represents to people at a theological level.

Another key thought came to me as I developed a further concept for the magazine: How often do I see a good technology/religion merger in a piece of work? The Catholic Church isn't known for keeping up with the pace of technology, and technology isn't known for emphasizing the spiritual needs of people. Since, through my schooling, I am trying to do both...why not create a magazine that does this?

With that concept developed, I continued to craft more spreads in InDesign. The use of topic headers gave it an official look...and the feedback I was getting from other students is that it look "official" or "like a real magazine."I was inspired by a science journal that used images to pull people into dull articles about algorithm design...so I liked how they crafted the pages.

This week, I created 8 more spreads to equal 10 total.

This was a wider image of the chapel that I used for a center-piece in the magazine. I blurred the image with a filter in photoshop to soften the light as well as alter the look somewhat. I liked the image because of the large negative-space on the left side, providing room for either text or just to make a statement regarding the placement of the artwork in real life.

I knew I had to include my artwork in this magazine, regardless of how I looked at the overall concept. However I struggled to find a good way to display what I'd created. The blue/black backdrop on the blue bottle with the black backdrop served as an interesting eye piece...both framing the image and drawing the eye to the bottom of the bottle.

The more spreads that were created, the more I realized that I was standardizing how the entire magazine would look. All pull-quotes would be in the orange font, with black lines above-and below. Much the way art can draw you in through framing that centers on an area, the black lines frame a larger text...pulling the eyes to read...and consequently getting the "previewer" to become a "reader."

The line drawings page gave me a lot of confusion. These were monochrome images in a magazine that was becoming quite colorful. It didn't help that I was displeased by these images. As I mentioned before, art is not my strong subject, yet these early attempts to use a graphic tablet were part of the course. I think I'll continue to have problems with this part of my magazine.

I liked the space and the text used in the section headers. There was not reason for choosing pink, other than I was following a similar color palette as Adobe does with it's different programs. Each section had a different name, and should also have a different reference color. We'll see what colors I use in further aspects of this magazine.

After getting all my artwork displayed (which didn't take long), I started working on the in-depth parts of my magazine. I created an article that looked at social media and social change...using the media that was being tied to both of these current movements. By this point, I'd pretty much solidified how the rest of the pages would look.

This was the first page that I used the concept of smaller sub-articles and graphics to explain. The separation of color removes the text from the rest of the article, without disturbing the flow of the body copy.

At this point, things were working easily. I took a book review that I'd done several months ago, and converted it for this project. I snagged an image from NASA's hubble telescope site, and added everything. While the the article is devoid of art, the entire article looks at how we define creation in terms of the physical or spiritual understanding.