Ysa's Level 4 Progress Blog

Progress Blog for L4 VisCom 23-26

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Process Book

After a lot of minor edits and improvements made to my process book, I was finally ready to print it. With the help of Jordy, things went smoothly and I even learned about a thing or two.

Some test prints I made first

The final book, printed and bound!

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Process Book

Since my last version was really colourless, I decided to assign a colour to each project and put a banner atop each page since I'm keeping it as empty space anyway. I also thought it was a neat addition, since the sections will be really clear in the book itself - it'll be visible from the edges of the paper.

However, as I went through my sections, the colour banner started feeling more and more like a constraint. For example:

I got really conflicted with this page since I wanted to make the images for the final app really big. If I wanted them to take up the whole page, do I shrink the colour banner? Do I remove it? Or do I just fit the images below the banner? I sat on that issue for a while and eventually decided to be rid of the banner. Instead, I kept colour borders on each section title page. It'll still mark the section on the sides of the book, so I didn't mind too much.

Now as I was working on the process book, I did them section by section, starting with There's an App for That. By the time I was at the final section, Place of Words, I realised my grid use changed a lot.

This was because some time ago, I visited the library and looked at a couple books:

Throughout the process of filling my sections in, I frequently looked back on these references. I would start out by copying their layouts/the parts of the layouts I liked best, then adapted them to my own content. Eventually, I ended up with my own Franken version.

Here's an example of how the changes happened. My first section was really cluttered, while my last was more structured and neat:

In the yellow (app), my text and images were all over the place. In the red (place of words), I kept larger images up top, smaller ones on the bottom. I thought the Place of Words organisation was much neater, so I went over the entire document again and made changes:

While definitely this process book of mine isn't ideal since I left it to the last minute, I got a lot of learning experience with grid usage in it.

For the cover, I just took one of the pieces I was really proud of. I really liked my magazine design so I took one of my illustrations from there:

It's very simple, but gets the point across. I edited the illustration a bit to better fit the context of the page. Initially I did think of making the entire book cover a pink/green colour, but I felt it was too busy. This version was cleaner and better suited the content of my process book.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

FINAL PRESENTATION

On Tuesday this week, we showed our final prints for the magazine and received feedback. This is what i showed:

The colours came out beautifully and I was very happy with the results. Here's the feedback I received:

The colours and illustrations were met with good reactions, especially the cover and the first spread, which I was especially proud of.

For the things I could improve: the cover and the final pink spread. For the cover, it came off as more of a poster rather than a magazine cover. To improve it, I made these changes:

Before (left) and after (right)

First, I removed the grain/noise effect I put on Relay. I first added it to match the texture of the illustration but that made it more poster-like. I made it crisp and matched its colour to the yellow circle on the background. Then, I lowered everything a bit to make space at the top for additional text. I also removed the white border since all of my text was in the image anyway.

It was cool to see how those small details made it look much more like a magazine and I'm happy with the final result!

For this spread, I was told that it looked a bit different from the rest since it's all pink. I thought about adding complementary colour accents but here's why I didn't:

Unlike the other spreads, this one only carried one idea. The first spread is supposed to cover the general idea that fashion styles can vastly change how you identify or are identified by others - a juxtaposition I helped clarify using complimentary colours.

On the next spread, it covered two ideas in the article - cultural contexts and group identities, therefore I assigned a monochromatic colour scheme to each of them. I made them complimentary as well so they would look nice next to each other. The pull quotes were the exception from the monochrome so the pages of the spread would interact better.

For the last spread, it only discusses social class and status. I picked out its mention of Valentino's hot pink collection trickling down to the public through fast fashion, like Zara. To complete the effect, I kept to the same colours for both pages.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

I've finished up on the illustrations for the last two spreads after a quick inspiration search over in Stack magazines' catalogue.

There was this magazine called Bum which caught my eye:

I was able to relate this magazine to mine since it's highly illustrative; it had a watercolour/ink style that stuck with a limited colour palette. I really liked how each of the spreads were cohesive - tied together by the same colours as their illustrations - and I thought I could apply the same to my spreads. Not only did the colour matching make the whole page look like it was part of the art, but it also brought attention to the pull quotes.

So, I changed the colours of my article's text according to the illustration on the page it was on, which brought it all together.

On the third spread directly above, the passage talks about how high fashion trickles into society as fast fashion, giving the example of Valentino's Hot Pink collection and Zara following suit.

To illustrate it, I first drew one of the models from the Valentino runway show, then later cut it into the clothes and put those into the UI of Zara's online shop; which I hope effectively delivers the idea of the text.

COVER

Now to finish off the cover.

From my last attempts, I really liked the long 'RELAY' going from top to bottom, but I left it at a clipping mask and didn't like how the illustration got covered up. So I tried a lot of variations:

I liked the layering interaction this had but it didn't make much sense; but putting the text fully behind the illustration made it impossible to read.

I tried another font, but wasn't a fan of the shapes-I felt it didn't go with the illustration.

Now with this one, I fixed up the legibility of the masthead by shortening half of Relay and placing it up front. I liked where this was going but was unhappy with the colour, so I played with a few. A lot actually but I forgot to take pictures of them.

Then I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere with the duotone so I brought in a third colour:

And from there it clicked. Triadic, similar to one of the trials I did earlier on (left), I applied the same colour to my new type arrangement (right):

And I think that's my cover done! All that's left is to wait for the final presentation.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

I made a bit more progress on the first spread today. I finished the felt tip drawing:

I then rendered out the drawing digitally to add more depth as well as tweak some details.

So the idea I had was to have a split visual of the model - have two opposing fashion styles. This was to mirror the idea of how different fashion styles can change how you're identified socially.

Although you can kind of tell from the shape, it's not obvious since it's all the same colour. I added a bit of piercings and tattoos to highlight the punk-ness of the right side but still it did not stand out too much.

So I tried splitting the image:

I liked the effect of the blending mode that I did on the right. The change in colour did well to split the image so I developed this further. I also tried out the image as a spread and felt like it could still be improved.

I found the blending mode that let me change the hue of the selected layer and was able to have a green-pink split. Honestly, colour picking for this magazine has just been drawing with felt tips as I pleased, then working with its complement later in the digital stage. I feel like it's worked well thus far.

I was really happy with the colour split so I rendered the model even more. By this point, I was starting to feel discontent with the plain colour background so I added some halftones for texture.

I tried putting the text on top of the halftone but it became a pain to read. I also tried putting a white background on the text itself but it wasn't a style I liked so I got rid of it immediately. So ultimately I just pushed the image back by two columns to leave plain white for the text.

Now I found the main title to be in an awkward place, and the white area on the right strangely empty; so I moved the title to the right:

And I think this is what I'll be keeping. I might tweak the text colours a bit more later, but overall I enjoy the spotlight on the model but still having the clean text.

Now moving on, I took the same halftone background idea to the other spreads:

For these, I kept them monochromatic since I wanted the split colour at the first spread to mirror the article's overarching theme.

Looking at the colours side by side, I think they go together nicely? Since they're all based off of the same set of felt tip pens, the colours were already cohesive to begin with in terms of saturation.

I didn't want to choose an overall colour scheme since I followed the themes of each spread, which I think works better for the article. At least I'm sure they're not clashing.

Now all I have to do is finalise my last two spreads and the cover.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Process Book

I haven't touched my process book in a while, so I finally started putting things in. I'm starting with There's an App for That.

Previously, I had settled on a layout that I liked and verified through printing, but it was all placeholder text with no actual images. So surely enough, after adding things in I started noticing it wasn't that nice at all. This is the old version:

And this is the overhaul I'm currently working on. I ended up changing fonts. I wanted to keep the decorative main heading, but thought the serif body text I had going on was clashing with the heading. I changed it to a sans serif font as well as increased its size and found it looking much better.

Moved things around a bit more and eventually got to this:

Right now it's looking really plain, being black and white, but I think I'll incorporate the project colours later.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

I continued working on my front cover again today. I experimented with using the text as a clipping mask and letting the illustration shine through. I quite like the effect but I think the illustration gets covered up too much. I'll try intertwining them next time.

Then I went back to my second spread, the one that feels really empty. I thought the illustrations were a bit random in comparison to the context of the text around it, so I decided to reiterate the illustrations into something more appropriate.

For the left page, I took the red bangles mentioned in the article. On the right, I drew Adidas shoes with the thought of 'sportswear' being a group identity. It's not exactly what's mentioned in the text but I think it's still relevant. Still, I'm happy with the result.

Now I also illustrated an image for the front cover and imported it into Photoshop for some additional detailing, but I was not happy with how it turned out.

I was trying to go for a half-and-half look on the model, one half being prim and proper whilst the other being punk-alternative. I didn't plan out my sketch very well and that resulted it in looking imbalanced; the proportions were off enough to bother me. I also tried putting it in Indesign:

It wasn't too bad but it could be better. So, I'm working on drawing a different image that will hopefully be better.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

So I had my 1:1 tutorial yesterday and raised my concern about feeling stuck. Briony gave some suggestions but to be fully honest I was too stressed to remember. As per her instructions, I printed out my spreads to have a feel for how it looked. I realised the font size was too big - somehow I used 12 pt.

In the process of checking my prints I had a few ideas come to me too. I first drew my models with felt tip pens, then experimented a bit with digital edits on top of those:

Once again, the marker drawing + the photoshopped image didn't line up and it bothered me. So I tried drawing digitally on top of the felt tip illustrations. I also played around with adding type to fill in the emptiness of my page:

I'm liking the digital + analogue illustration layering and I think it's what I'll go with then. But the type I'm not content with and want to change.

Now I also started drawing my cover image since I've been putting that off. I knew since the beginning that I wanted a big image of a model, so I found a reference and drew it with felt tip pens:

Since I want the front cover to be more special, I layered on some coloured pencil on the skin areas to add even more texture and dimension. I then tried out this image in Indesign to play with cover layouts:

I haven't experimented much yet but so far it's interesting. The type I think might not be working as well as I'd hoped, but we'll see.

In the middle of this, I also looked back at my layouts and tried figuring out what was so awkward about it. I think it was the width of my columns. I did a quick skim through magazines at Stack - I looked at the fashion, design, and illustration tags in the store.

Here's two examples that I liked. I noticed that their pages had two columns of text across the entire page width - so I went in and modified mine and I think I'm liking it better now!

There's still the emptiness of the page that I have to deal with though.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

I've spent too much time thinking rather than doing, and it's caused me to lose a lot of time. So far, all I have is my layout and no illustrations.

Since there's a tutorial tomorrow, I'm going to try and illustrate a few models. Based on my last attempt, I wasn't happy with how the felt tip + digital edit was since they don't line up. Also, since I was taking random images from Pinterest, the quality wasn't great either.

What I've done here is I've just taken the pictures, cut out the models using Photoshop, then blocked in the skin with colour. They look fine, but I'm also not happy with how simple it is, I feel like I'm cheating since I'm just editing pictures online without even knowing who to credit.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Communicating in Colour

Finally came in today to present the finished postcards. For my belly band, I just did a quick cutout of a sun to mimic the symbol in the Philippine flag.

To conclude, these are the explanations behind each postcard.

My overarching colour theme was the triadic theme already provided by my flag; red, yellow, and blue. Officially, each of the colours of the Philippine flag represent something such as blue for peace, red for patriotism and bravery. But for my postcards, I linked each of the colours to my own experiences of the Philippines as my hometown.

Yellow, PH: This card simply shows my home country as a whole. A joyful yellow to mirror the brightness of my country and its people.

Red, Carabao: 'Carabao' is the name of the mango variety that I like the most - it's the world's sweetest mango, and a fruit I miss dearly.

Blue/green, Laguna: Green isn't part of the flag colours, but I wanted to include a nod to the flora of my country. Laguna is home to Mount Makiling, a dormant volcano covered in rich biodiversity. This same mountain is where my old arts school is situated, where I studied for a year.

Blue, Manila (MNL): This card features a memory of late night drives through the city; surrounded by brake lights and the stretch of buildings above as we crawl through the traffic of the capital.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Communicating in Colour

Now looking at the work I did last night, I wasn't happy with how things were turning out on Illustrator, so I moved to Photoshop. Since I didn’t like the first beach illustration I did, I tried another:

But I still wasn’t happy with how it turned out so I went for a cityscape instead. For the colours, I went with a monochromatic blue colour scheme, starting off from the blue I colour picked from the Philippine flag. I felt it would mimic the dark drives through the streets of Manila.

For my next postcard, I wanted to do something that had food that reminded me of home, and it had to be either red, white, or yellow to fit with my overall theme. I ended up choosing the mango since it’s my favourite fruit, and the world’s sweetest mango.

I played around with laying it out on the card along with text.

I decided to go with a red orange background since it went really well with the mango. I recently looked into Swiss typography so I wanted to try it out. I started with Helvetica, but wanted to try it with a different font. I really liked how it looked so I went with it.

For the next postcard, I wanted to give a nod to the nature in the Philippines. I thought the perfect scene for this was that of Mount Makiling, where I spent a year to study fine art. While making this card, I also thought to include text on the first drawing I did. I wrote MNL, short for Manila.

Here’s the first three all next to each other.

Now for the last postcard, I wasn’t too sure what to do anymore. I first planned on having an all type card - which I tried and ultimately didn’t like:

I felt like they didn’t fit at all with the rest of the set, so I went and added an illustration instead. Still, I wanted it to be simple (and yellow). I first tried to draw a sun, again taking from the flag.

But it didn’t turn out well so I tried drawing the country itself.

I was quite content with this, so I went with it. Here’s the complete set:

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Communicating in Colour

For me, my 'hometown' is the Philippines where I lived the first 13 years of my life. I thought to go into the colours of the Philippine flag as the basis of my colour picking. Red, blue, white, and yellow.

To me, the Philippines is a vibrant place; from its warm and diverse population, our festivals, our food, our biodiversity, our landscapes. To capture this, I want to use bright and bold colours.

I started with an image of the flag, taking its hex codes and putting them into Adobe Colours to play around with the colour wheel:

For the postcard, I want to do either illustration, typography, or both.

I found this font called ‘8’ and instantly thought it was perfect so I put it into Illustrator and tried out some words with colour:

I think out of the 4 postcards I might do one that’s purely type.

What I’m thinking of for a colour scheme for the other postcards is using each colour from the triad and making either a analogous or monochromatic postcard from it; or pick 1 colour to use as the main, then mute/minimise the rest.

These were some trials I did. I tried to trace an image of a Philippine dessert called Taho, but it was difficult to do so I stopped. With my triadic colour palette, drawing this food looked wrong. The solution to this problem would be to go off and make more colour palettes from the original triad (I tried it on the yellow seen above) but it was taking up too much time. I moved on to drawing a beach:

I used the blue and just upped its tint for the water, then used desaturated yellow for the sand. I then added the word "dalampasigan" which means shore/beach in Tagalog.

I’m not too happy with the result since I feel like it’s too plain. I liked how the text looked on its own, but with the illustration it looked wrong.

I also played around with colouring and layering the text, and I left it at that for the day.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

DEVELOPMENT

For Monday's tutorial/studio day, I worked on some spreads and printed them for the tutorial. These were the two I liked most:

Since I did my research on Vogue, I had a solid idea of their layout and applied these to my spreads - save for the number of columns, which I did as 5 instead of Vogue's usual 3 or 4. (I used placeholder images from Unsplash for now since I don't have illustrations yet). In my test layouts that I printed, I felt like the 5 column grid made my text columns too wide (I used 2 columns for the width of the body text, 3 or more for other text), so I plan on trying out a 4 column width instead.

I also played with a lot of different fonts for this test round so that I can get an opinion on them. Like in Vogue, I took a decorative/special font for main headings, a sans serif for subheadings, then a serif font for the body text. I'm not too sure I was happy with what I chose though.

I thought for this fashion magazine, I could take a sharp, edgy font (see left image above) to make the article look more contemporary, but in the tutorial I was told that it might not be fitting. But this will be reliant on the images I create - so I can put that off for now.

It was also suggested to me to look at more current magazines rather than Vogue.

IMAGE MAKING

For my image making, I did a quick test of the marker-and-digital idea I had. I did this in the studio so I didn't have my drawing tablet with me, so I was only able to make something roughly. I referenced random models from Pinterest and drew them:

Then, I scanned one drawing and put it into Photoshop:

Personally I'm not too big of a fan of this one but my tutorial group thought otherwise. The combination of marker and the texture of the clothing looked novel. I also tried drawing digitally:

-but this was not at all great since I would've drawn properly with my drawing tablet; which is my next task.

A problem I encountered while working on these illustrations was that the fashion references I needed to do these images have to be connected to the article's contents. I could draw random models like in Vogue, but I feel like that misses the point of the brief. On the other hand, finding the right images of models with clothing relevant to my article is tricky too; and I do not have the material/clothing needed to take the pictures myself.

This gave me two options off the top of my head:

Do full illustrations and forego the photography, saving me from the reference picture hunt But raising the challenge of drawing up outfits from my mind. Also, this sacrifices the interesting combination of textures.

Look for model photographs and possibly sacrifice relevance to the article, saving me from the struggle of drawing clothes.

During the studio day, I found these images on Pinterest that interested me:

It has a collage feel but isn't crowded and distracting, which I enjoyed. I also liked the interaction of text and image here. I also like the model's poses and feel it's perfect for our demographic. However, I cannot use these images for my actual work because not only are they unrelated to my article, but referencing might be an issue since it's from Pinterest.

I'm going to try the full illustrative route for now and see how detailed I can make the clothes.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Hot Glue Induction

After this session I'm now thinking of editing my margins in anticipation for the binding and cutting.

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Colour Workshop

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

DEVELOPMENT

Now with an idea of layouts from my Vogue research, I laid out the article in my InDesign document.

The article can be divided into 5 sections, with an introduction, three discussion paragraphs, and a conclusion. I know from looking at Vogue that I want a the first spread to be the introduction to the feature, which leaves me with 2 spreads. I'm not too sure about how I want the 2 spreads to be laid out, if I'm putting 2 of the discussion paragraphs on a single spread or splitting one,, but we'll see.

Also, you’ll notice that I’m not using rows, just columns. I think for this project, I’ll just stick to columns since there’s not many components I need to shuffle around the page.

So far I've taken a placeholder image from Unsplash for now - just to see how I'm going to lay out the first spread since it's the one I'm most sure of for now. I'm thinking of doing the spillover image OR a full image spread.

I also realise I need to be thinking about my illustrations - I'm thinking of doing marker illustrations but putting a digital spin to it. This is the marker illustration style I'm thinking of:

[ysa-dalawatatlo]

Place of Words

VOGUE RESEARCH

I first took a look at Vogue, skimming through the archives. I chose to look at the May issue for every 10 years, starting from 1950. I laid it all out on my process book document. It's only pictures right now since I'll be discussing here. They are arranged chronologically from top to bottom:

The covers sport the classic portrait of a woman and the large masthead. The portraits are aligned to the right, save for the 1950 cover which is centred. The mastheads do not really interact with the portraits. On the left, feature titles wrap around the portraits.

The pages typically follow either a 4-column or 3-column grid. Text and imagery take up the space of the page entirely, the information is dense and with little negative space, again with the exception of the 1950 edition. I personally find the 4-column pages too academic-looking, not really dynamic. There is little text layered over the images, it appears strongly adherent to the columns.

None of the images are too exciting, they're model shoots that showcase the fashion being featured. They are clean, full shots rather than collated.

I enjoy how some of the images take up full pages, while others bleed onto the next page.

The covers now have half/full body shots as opposed to the portrait-exclusive era seen prior. The models and mastheads also interact, the models being in front of the text which I find more pleasing. The features' titles/catchphrases are now bolder than the previous decades, sporting more colour.

These also follow the 3-4 column grids, as well as similar image layouts.

1990 is showing some large title text that goes over both pages which I find impactful in its breaking past the grid.

Again, I enjoy the image spillovers but I also appreciate the double image spread from the year 2000 with a large title "scents & sensibility" at the bottom + some caption on the left page.

The first thing I've noticed is that the covers now have much less text, with even the masthead becoming barely noticeable. It seems like much more attention is being brought to the subjects of the cover.

Vogue has retained the same layout throughout these years, with the most changes I think being in the text. 2021-2023 seem to be consistent in style: the same/very similar fonts, the same drop cap. I suppose it's also worth noting that these were released only a year apart from one another, compared to the ten year gaps of those previously mentioned.

The text-image layout is much cleaner this time, there is no text layered on the images that feel like they're breaking boundaries.

Though I do enjoy the layouts of Vogue, I think I would prefer more negative space. But, I've definitely taken note of the image placement as well as their subject matters which I could then bring into my own work.

Each of the spreads I've viewed all have a clean, sophisticated air to them which I like but think moves away from the 18-25 year old target audience, so I've also taken a look at the more appropriate Teen Vogue:

My immediate thoughts when looking through this magazine: it's packed. It was so busy with products here and there. It's much more image heavy than text, and I actually found it difficult to find article-like chunks of text similar to those seen regularly in Vogue. I suppose it's due to the younger generation not being so fond of reading anymore.

The left page shown above are mostly double page spreads of images. There is little text, showing just titles and captions.

The right page shows images I found with some text. Still, it's image-dominated. The image in the middle is especially chaotic, with clothing images collated on the full spread.

The typefaces used are sans serif for headers (bold) and captions (thin), but serif for the body text.