MAGAZINE DESIGN - ALIGN MAG
designed by SHIYAO WANG
ALIGN Magazine is designed for the readers who are professional graphic designers and design enthusiasts. Considering this visually sophisticated audience, this design pay close attention to typographic detailing and innovative word-image relationships.
.
01 Overview
02 Masthead
ALIGN, which means place the lines straight, in typographic design, align means make letters setting straightly. Based from these meanings, my masthead are designed in a simple and clear style without too many complicated decorations. The design elements I had used into the masthead were lines and a tag, inspired by inspired by " TypoMag ".
For the lines indicate “A Line” which means make letter in a line. And for the tag, firstly, tag is the element that use mostly in graphic design, and the use of tag could made audience know this is a magazine at the first glance.
03 The Covers
Issue 01_Typography Feature articles: ‘The Crystal Goblet’ by Beatrice Warde and 'Fluid Mechanics' by Ellen Lupton.
Issue 02_Color Feature articles: ‘Chromatic Diet’ by Sophie Calle and ‘White’ by Kenya Hara.
Issue 03_Technology Feature articles: ‘Technology as a Material’ by Tom Armitage and ‘The future of printed books’ by Clive Thompson.
Issue 01
TYPOGRAPHY
Ellen Lupton’s article, “The Fluid Mechanism” talks about the typography history movement, evidenced that differences between classical typography in the past and modern typography today.
In the article, it introduced the evolution of typography since its invention from 19th to 21st century, by contrasting between past and present, from the use of type, flush of page, media of publish, font choosing, the use of images, designers attitudes to the effects.
Regarding on what Ellen said that, ' the visual language has increasingly diverse as the new fonts and formats involve the world so typography design became variable and break the rules'.
My concept was inspired by these quotes that highlighted above.
The letterpress types as the key visual element convey the message that each single letter is made up with typefaces from different time, from historic style to the modern. Put each letterforms together to visualize the changes of typography; In addition, the each single letter came up with a hint "A HISTORY OF TYPOGRAPHY",
Issue 02
COLOUR
My concept was inspired from both article 'white' and 'Chromatic Diet', I thought to make the cover in the different colour schemes as Chromatic Diet did, by using the element feathers. (Sophie Calle created work called 'The Chromatic Diet', the series of colour coordinated meals and for six days she consumed a diet of a single food colour.) Feather has been widely interpreted as symbol of vintage art and there were many ways to play with color scheme as it could be varies in colors, shapes and forms,
Issue 03
TECHNOLOGYIn the article 'Technology as materials', the author gives the opinion that 'technology is not only a tool for use, it actually is a material need user to understand its function, and why it exist'. His opinion was try to tell us before using the technology, we should look closely or look inside to the technology machine. So my cover showed what is looked like inside a typewriter, and it also represent the function of the typewriter.
04 The Layouts
_FEATURE ARTICLE #1 _FLUID MECHANICS
Fluid Mechanics is the article that basically introduced the history movement of typography. Ellen introduced the typography was transforming into varies and would be keep changing and changing by time. She believe typography therefore is fluid, it is arranging in space and time, in the chaotic and dynamic shape. I was inspired by the sentence "arranging in space ____and t:me" and the other one "View from the distance, the typography is like a block of grey." For my layout design, you will see, there are many grey blocks across everywhere on the pages, it is the way to make audience directly make sense with this pull quote. The second spread, I have broken the rules, arranging the quote out of text grid, it took a lot spaces for me and also highlight the words of space and time. What's more, there are more in the details, there are few paragraphs were designed with different line spacing, the paragraph here is not only texts but also as the graphics to express the sentence of " design is often an attack the structure".
