magazine layout: development in illustrator

This is what my first page layout looks like, it is quite simple and uses the idea from Carson's article of using just two of the colours, I have decided from here that it looks rather plain and that I need to embed some images so it looks more interesting. For the title I used the idea that I made in my book of the collage layouts as I thought this would look rather interesting. It would look much better if I had scanned the same thing from my book and placed it onto the illustrator version as it would have shown all the pencil marks. If I am to use this idea I would scan the ripped paper with the pencil marks on it instead, as it would probably look more natural than just something that I got off Google images.  

The green colour used matches the drawing of the necklace that I drew featured in this magazine layout, I thought that this would be a good idea to connect the colours and make it all the same.The layout seems to have an equal balance on both sides of images and text which is spaced. I think the quote looks a bit squashed there and so may have to move it around if I was going to use this layout.   

From Carson's piece I saw the title in red and so used this on my piece and overlapped the images with the title. I also placed an image behind the actual article this was mainly so I could fit it all in but then it was hard to read the text over the dark parts of the image. so have decided to remove the middle image at the top of the page with the image originally in the article.

This is what it looked like once I moved the image, even though with all the images at the top of the page it didn't look unbalanced it looked to plain and boring just having the text from the article from the bottom of the images to the bottom of the page so this is a layout I will definitely not be using. I kept the red for the colour of the title as it stands out with the colour of the background of images just like David Carson used red in his.

This is my third experimental magazine layout and is the most colourful one that I have created, after creating this one I think that I need to chose a colour scheme and stick to it so that it has some structure and looks less childish. To create the horizontal dashes in between the article I used Photoshop and used a special brush, turned the opacity up to 100% and made it a fairly big brush size this is so you could actually see the texture and the blurring. I think one looks much better than the Natsko Seki 

This is evidence to show me adding text and moving scanned images around

Here I am changing the colours of the blue squares to a lighter shade of blue as I thought the darker shade of blue was to close to the blue at the top. 

This is my fourth and final illustrator magazine layout, I feel that this is the most successful one apart from the fact that it isn't actually complete because not all of the text is on it but the idea of the text is there between the shapes of the images. The images however are all on the right hand side and so make it look unbalanced so would have to do a little moving around. I also created swirls with the typography and without it, screen shots below showed how I made them. 

I first opened Photoshop and then pressed the command and quote mark kay on a mac keyboard to bring up the graph lines

The graph allows me to draw straight lines and would make it look more interesting as i knew I wouldn't be able to get it perfect anyway if I didn't have the graph.

On the paint brush I clicked a bright red colour on a size 59 brush and made a range of swirls

I then took the graph away by pressing the command and quote mark keys again and saved it as a JPEG.