Digital Magazine Design

Daniel Carpenter

Description

Publishers of contemporary magazines invest more and more money in developing innovative design for an increasingly design-literate reader. Innovation, however, must always be grounded in the underlying conventions of legibility to ensure loyal readership and economic success.

Digital Magazine Design provides detailed descriptions of all the necessary rules of design, and uses these rules to cast a critical eye over a selection of contemporary high-street magazines.

The second part of this volume, written by publishing students, demonstrates how the tools of design can be applied to the analysis and practice of contemporary magazine design.

Through an understanding of the relationship between text, image and design, and the ability to make informed judgements, the student is able to critically evaluate all publishable material.

Sujets

• Augmented Reality
• Virtual Reality
• Computers
• Informatique
• General officer
• Comics
• Publishing
• Photography
• Design
• General
• Comic

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509723
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Approaching Magazine Design
with student case studies
edited by
Paul Honeywill Daniel Carpenter
First published in 2002 by
intellect Books PO Box 862, Bristol, BS99 IDE, UK
First published in USA in 2002 by
intellect Books ISBS, 5804 N. E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA
Copyright Part 1 2002 Paul Honeywill Part 2 2002 Jennifer Campbell, Becky Gadd, Daniel Carpenter, Paul Prudden, May Yao and Alison Evans respectively
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
Consulting Editor Masoud Yazdani Edited by Daniel Carpenter Cover design by Paul Honeywill and Daniel Carpenter
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-972-8 / ISBN 1-84150-086-0
Printed and bound in the UK by Antony Rowe, Eastbourne
Contents Acknowledgements Preface Part 1 Design Skills Chapter 1 Stepping up to the Interface 2 Underlying Principles 3 Setting up the Page 4 Manipulating the Page 5 Understanding Type 6 Potential Problems Part 2 Student Case Studies Chapter 7 Essentials and Shout 8 Kerrang! 9 Hotline 10 Hi-Fi News 11 She and Real Simple 12 Empire and Classic FM Bibliography Index
Acknowledgements
The author and editor would like to thank the postgraduate students of the University of Plymouth Faculty of Arts and Education for their contributions, Jane Weston for her help and advice, and Phil Cutler and Nic Earle for their technical support.
Trademarks
Throughout this book trademarked names occur. Rather than put a trademark symbol in every occurrence, we state that the names are used only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the owner with no intention of infringement.
Preface
Page design without the aid of a computer is almost unheard of these days, but there is still much to learn from the past by applying accepted principles to contemporary magazine design. Laying out pages before computers required a detailed understanding of the processes involved. The advent of desktop publishing has led to the removal of many of those processes which retained trade and professional specialisms, such as graphic design, typesetting and so on. Consequently, DTP became branded as a lower order of design by some professionals. In many cases it was a lack of design knowledge that gave dismissive ammunition to the elite few who regarded DTP in this way. In its defense, it was not the technology that reflected the design quality; it was its availability to anybody who wanted to desktop publish .
Contemporary publications can have very complex designs and by analyzing their structure and components it is possible to understand and apply these methodologies to other areas of design such as leaflets, posters and so on. Magazines are a good starting point because they know who their audience is and are designed accordingly.
The first part of this book will equip you with a foundation of knowledge that will allow you to develop appropriate design skills by understanding what to look for, as opposed to being shown examples of clever designs which you could reproduce only by step-by-step copying without knowing why. The second part of this book contains a series of case studies by postgraduate Publishing students who have used the first part of this book as reference in the form of course handouts. None of these students have a design background, but because technology allows one person to perform many tasks within the publishing process it is important for them to have this grounding. Each case study is concerned with text, image, design and the way a reader perceives published material through legibility and editorial suitability for its intended use. Through understanding the relationship between these factors and being capable of making informed judgments, the student is able to make a critical and analytical evaluation of all publishable material. This is achieved through the analysis of a magazine publication s physical architecture, graphic and typographic personality, method of production and intended readership.
Postgraduate publishing students at the University of Plymouth are required to develop the case study by identifying a magazine which is relevant to their interest and worthy of further study by devising a small-scale investigation or project to carry out. As I have said, none of the students who have written the case studies are designers, but they will be expected to work with design and edit text in their chosen career as publishers. In this respect, it is the intention of this book to equip the reader with the tools of design and to give examples of how to achieve good practice in applying these tools to contemporary printed material.
Paul Honeywill University of Plymouth
Stepping up to the Interface
If you are relatively new to using a computer to design a page, this chapter suggests an initial approach. When learning a specific page-design program, it is always best to understand the real- world metaphor that the software uses to describe the tools and techniques that a graphic designer would use. I have always found it useful for the student to understand how a program describes the computer interface as a working graphic studio, and then position the student in relation to the computer and the design. Learning software on its own is insufficient, even though page- design training often tends to be confined to software learning. Understanding comes from your knowledge of the metaphor that the computer uses to describe the real world. If you, as a student, understand the logic of the metaphor and its functions, you are then equipped to learn, develop and exploit the nature of digital design.
There are many page-design programs. However, the principles of stepping up to the interface are almost always the same. Students who have undertaken the case studies in the final section of this book have all used QuarkXPress. Most interface references will be to that program.
You learn to navigate through the real world by recognizing representational symbols that describe objects, and the actions that you should take as a consequence. You are able to adjust the sound level on your computer with relative ease because the graphic representation of the volume control is familiar. An unfamiliar image would not enable you to understand its function. Learning to use any page-design program is no different. By unpacking and understanding these processes you should be able to familiarize yourself each time your chosen software package is upgraded or undergoes a major redesign of its interface and functions.

You understand the metaphor that the computer volume control uses to describe the real world; when you adjust the volume control this is exactly what you expect. Learning to use your chosen page-design software is no different.
By doing so you can extend this approach and apply this method to any software. This introductory chapter could be used for any program which has been written to operate in a windows environment for either Macintosh or PC. What is important is your understanding of what the action words mean and how the desktop metaphor of noun and verb represent these actions. When using the image-manipulation software Photoshop, a photographer would understand the function of a Noise Filter for Despeckling or altering the radius of the Median because it relates to a real-life process that he or she is familiar with. A graphic designer will understand the language of typography used as the action verbs within page design programs, such as track (overall space between letters and words) and kern (individual space between letters).
The nature of design using a computer allows you to reflect upon human perception, which tends to be altered through the new possibilities that the digital capability of a computer can offer. By exploring the potential of design using computers, new opportunities can be established. There are three distinct concepts you need to understand to effectively use page-design programs as a tool:
The software object/action computer interface is a metaphor for working in a graphic design studio;
Knowledge of design, its principles and its terminology are just as important when using a computer to design as they ever were;
Certain elements of design remain constant, while other elements can be exploited using a computer.
Understanding the desktop metaphor and being familiar with computer interfaces encourages you to make the most of new opportunities. Pointing and selecting becomes inseparable from the desktop assumption that people are inquisitive; they want to learn, especially if the environment appears recognizable and engaging. With most page-design programs the design studio metaphor creates an interface that allows you to use the tools of graphic design. To operate the computer you look for objects that are familiar. These objects suggest their function; even though the language and description of functionality needs only to be approximate and not exact (for more on interface iconography, go to www.w3icons.com ).
The Interface as a Metaphor for the Real World
Successful computer operation owes much to the rules of Isotype (International System Of TYpographic Picture Education). The importance of Isotype with regard to computer interaction is the collaboration between Ogden, who was the inventor of Basic English (British American Scientific International Commercial), and Neurath. Ogden had asked Neurath to publish an outline of his visual language; Neurath agreed if Ogden also allowed Basic to be combined with Isotype in an additional book, Basic by Isotype. Ogden s Basic English contained 850 core words which were mainly nouns or verbs.
These two fundamental paradigms of object and action are central to the computer deskt