Front Cover

It was hard to pick a front cover for my magazine, as it had to be the right one. The front cover would be the first impression of my magazine, and I wanted it to capture the essence of what the magazine is really about. This would hopefully make people want to pick it up and read the magazine.

I chose this photo at first, as I thought it captured the heart of the community. The photograph was good, but it was a bit too distracting from the title of the magazine itself. This was a real issue and I tried a variety of colours and techniques, it still wasn't working.
Here is the final front cover.

Developing written Pieces

One of the most important things for me was talking to the public, and getting to know new faces. This gave me inspiration for my written pieces as well as gain knowledge of the community as a whole. I found it really interesting finding out where people had traveled from to get to Looe and hearing all of their thoughts on their surroundings, also interviewing local businesses gave me an insight into the history of the town.
One of my favourite writers from the Suitcase magazine is Kate Hamilton, who is a freelance writer and journalist. I liked how real the style of writing was, it told the truth and what people really would want to know when visiting a new place, and this can sometimes be comical which adds personality to to the writing. The reader could really imagine themselves there when reading article as she creates imagery within her written pieces.
Some of her work gave me my inspiration for the opening article for my magazine.

Layout

This is a page of the suitcase magazine, as I was reading it I thought of an idea of a layout that I could use for my magazine. I started by gathering facts from my interviews and what I had learned whilst visiting Looe.

Here is my final layout for the page.

Making of the Magazine

I got my inspiration for the layout of the fish monger interview from the Suitcase magazine and the Modern Rustic magazine. I liked how it was collage like, and the white lines in between the photo's created a nice frame around them. This mad the overall image and layout look clean cut and sharp.

Here is my final layout, to achieve this I had to create lots of individual picture boxes to place the pictures in, and use the line tool to create the boarders for the photo's.

Inspiration for a photograph

This image was taken from Pinterest, I liked the rawness of the image and how the image was graded. The fish has an extremely fresh look, and this is how I wanted my image of the fish to be. This was very important to me as all of the fish in the fish mongers where caught locally and daily which meant they where getting fresh fish every time.

Here is my final edited image of the fish from Pengelly's fish mongers, with the article I wrote underneath.

Layout for advertising

The process
So I had lots of ideas for the magazine layout of the bags and purses, I was really keen on one particular one. I was researching materials and colours to do with the sea and came across this image. I thought why not use the layering technique to create a picture from the different materials used to make the bags. I planned to the write about the bags on the other page, as I thought the image would be strong on its own. Image taken from http://www.edelkoort.com/trend_publication/

I cut out the material in a wave shape to make the sea, and used different shades of blue for depth. I crumpled up some white paper to make it look more like clouds, and added some seagulls also made from material.

I then started to work on the layout on in design, this is what I initially came up with.

My initial thoughts where the picture that I had created was too distracting, and you couldn't see the link between the two. Also the image had to be cropped to fit which made it even more in your face.

 I didn't like the font Gotham which was used at the top left hand corner of the page, I felt that it didn't fit with the layout and style so I changed the font to minion pro. This also made me reconsider the layout as a whole, so I did some more research and created a new layout to really focus on advertising the bags.

 Here is a screenshot of the final display of the bags in the magazine, below that is my inspiration which was taken from the modern rustic country living magazine issue 4.

Here is my inspiration

Photographing the bags

I decided to stay with the same theme and setting when it came to photographing the bags, originally I planned to photograph them all on the beach with someone sitting reading a book to set the scene.

I tried this out but wasn't able to get the best quality photo's at the time, as it was sunset and it was low light which made the bag hard to see. If I had more time to photograph the bags, I would definitely go back to the beach to photograph them again.

Making Bags and Purses

After doing my research on making bags and purses, I designed the shape and style I wanted them to be. I measured out the lengths and cut them to fit, then sewed them with the sewing machine inside out so the stitching would show on the inside. After I had done this I turned the bag out the right way and sewed the handles onto the bag.
The process was longer than expected, as I lined all of the bags with material to make them more substantial. This meant more measuring and more cutting out, also making sure the stitches where neat and straight required a lot of practice.

Magazine layout

 From my research on magazine layout designs, I started to create my own layout. I liked to combine my photography and use it as part of the final background for some of my pages, such as this photo here used as the background for the recipe. Also you can see here that I cropped a lot out of the original photo, as I felt that there was too much going on in the photo, also some of the items in the background took the focus away from the food

Preparing the food

Before photographing the food, I had to prepare the food and make it look attractive and appetizing. This was quite a hard process and required a lot of thinking on different ways to present the food. It was also quite easy to add too much to the photo, I think this is where I had problems, the photo became too distracting as there was too much going on. when I edited my photos, I cropped out the majority of the photo to just focus on the food itself. Above is an example of the original photo and the edited version underneath. I realized to achieve the photo theme I wanted, I would have to not make the lighting too bright, and lighten up the photo using Photoshop. This mad the photo more rich without the photo looking too white and shiny from the lighting.

Setting up the studio

I decided to stick with the grey colour scheme and use a grey table cover, I also used slates to present the food on. I thought that red would contrast really well with the grey, so I also used red Tea and Coffee jars to stick with the theme of a home kitchen. Other equipment I used was lighting,to really bring out the parts of the photo I wanted viewers to focus on, and a tripod to higher or lower the camera to the right position.

Creating the studio

For my pictures to look like my artist research I needed a plain background with no pattern. I noticed that all of the backgrounds used in the photos where quite a dull grey colour, so I used wall paint mixed with white acrylic to create this effect.

Editing Photos

I wanted to make my photos look crisp and clean, so I did some research into different photoshop and lightroom techniques. I also watched youtube videos on editing photos and making text transparent.

Here is a photo that I found as an example of the type of photo editing I wanted to achieve, using grading.

Here is one of my photo's that I edited, and added transparent text to for a greater impact.

Working with In Design

After the workshop I decided to practise the skills that I had learned to develop a new poster in the style of this layout.

I tried to work out how the box around the text was achieved, at first i started to create a box with lines.

This didn't work because the lines were not accurate, and they where not evenly spaced around the text.

 I also tried to adjust the colour of the text because I thought that it wasn't readable.

After playing around with the shape tool I figured out that I needed to create a rectangle around the text, centre the rectangle and then create an outline.

Sea Recipes Typography

I started to create my design using flour and a paint brush to sculpt the letter to get fine detail. The first letter took me at least 15-20 mins, then the process started to get a lot faster once I got used to using the brush in the right way to delicately form the words. After I had finished the words, I used fruit and vegetables for more decoration to make it look more attractive. The whole process took me 1 hour, not including the photography which took me half an hour or so to set up the layout for the photo.

Food typography

based on my research into food typography, I have drawn out some designs of my own which I plan to try out using flour and other ingredients to make.
here are photos of the process in which i went through to get to the point of my final designs.

Food typography

I have recently been researching different ways of displaying the chapters of my zine, such as title pages. I have included a recipe section in my zine and I think that this would be an effective, eyecatching way of introducing the recipes.Here is a moodboard of all the examples of food typography I found.

Interviews with people/public

I explored the streets of Looe and the beach and asked various people different questions about the style of living, and life by the sea and what effect it has on them. I plan to use their responses to write an article for my zine.

Interview with people in Looe

Questions

1) Are you visiting, or do you live locally?

2) If you could describe your surroundings in one sentence what would it be?

3) Describe how life by the sea makes you feel.

Answers

1)   Visiting age 40-49

Visiting age 20-29

Visiting age 50 and above

Local age 40-49

Local age 40-49

2) Peaceful

    Don’t know how I would describe my surroundings to be honest.

My surrounding are beautiful.

The community has such a wonderful bond.

Friendly.

     3) It makes you feel like you don’t want to go home.

It makes me feel Invigorated.

It makes me feel relaxed.

It makes me feel good.

It makes me feel relaxed, wonderful and well.

Interview with fish monger

I interviewed a fish monger about their business, it was very interesting to talk to a local business and find out about the history of the business. Pengelly's has a very friendly atmosphere, and where more welcoming to their customers, and regulars. They where more than happy to help me with my project by allowing me to be apart of the atmosphere and take in what the business is really about.

Interview with Pengelly’s Fish Monger

1) Is there anything you would say to people about why they should buy locally rather than go elsewhere, such as large retail Supermarkets?

It is important to support our industry for jobs, not only do we land one of the most good quality fish in the country, it provides people with jobs, it’s about sustainability.

We don’t take all the stocks because we fish daily and locally, we only take what we need plus you are always guaranteed fresh fish. We buy from day boats, and are probably the only ones in Cornwall who specialise from Looe fish.  We are the 5^th generation of fish mongers from the family business, and between all of us there is over 100 years of experience.

2) Is anything else you would like to add about your business that is significant to you?

We are responsible buyers who buy from responsible fishermen, who fish sustainably.

The business is also unique because it is run by all women.

3) Are there any fish recipes you would suggest ?

Because the fish is so fresh you don’t need to over complicate it because the taste will be fresh, you can season the fish with a coat of flour and sprinkle a bit of black pepper on the fish, then fry it piping hot with oil and the juice of a lemon.

Mind Map about content

Jewellery Design

Here is a first draft sketch of the jewellery I plan to make. For other designs I plan to add beads onto the rope.