Katie McInerney-Magazine project

Magazine identity and readership

My magazine, entitled “gametime,” is intended for avid sports fans. The primary target audience is 18-35 year olds, but it would be able to address older fans that are able to communicate with a younger generation, as well as younger fans, such as teenagers, who are knowledgeable about sports. However, it would not be the same as other sports magazines; it would have an edgy and youthful look to it, along with a more creative layout and design, similar to that in fashion magazines with larger margins and eclectic design ideas. The magazine would be marketed towards males, because they make up the largest demographic of sports fans, but women would be able to read and understand it, even if the advertising wasn’t necessarily catered towards them.

Magazine visual identity

Most sports are aggressive and physical games, and I want to convey that “in-your-face” attitude through my layout by using heavy, large slab serif typefaces as the basis for my magazine. These typefaces would reflect the types of articles and sports covered in the magazine (it wouldn’t necessarily be featuring things like cricket and bocce ball). Passers-by who would see this magazine on a newsstand would know what sports they could find covered: football, basketball, baseball, hockey, and other traditional sports that have a relatively widespread audience. The design is full of thick lines and deep, vibrant colors, emphasizing the heaviness of the topic itself.

Article visual identity

My article discusses the brutality and competitiveness of the Big East NCAA basketball conference, so I chose deep colors and slab serifs to bring that aggressiveness to the page. My choice of visuals, which consist of photographs that actually show aggressiveness (pushing, blocking out, etc.) helps to further convey this combativeness in college basketball.

Article design strategy

As stated before, my message is conveyed through my choice of slab serif font (Aachen), set large and continued in different places throughout the entire design. The initial visual of Jonny Flynn was edited to be pushing away the title, “Step Aside,” to again emphasize the aggressive nature of the league. The huge title font overpowers the sans serif deck, which shows that the text is important (it is on the feature spread) but it is not as important as the headline, which conveys a lot on its own. I used a consistent theme of orange and blue for the majority of the layout to provide consistency, along with the sans serif deck font (Calibri) in orange for sub headlines within the text to break up the long article. In some spaces, to provide a different color scheme, I pulled colors from the images (the text color in the sidebar corresponds to the color of the image; the pull quote on the second jump spread matches the uniform of the Pitt player above it). I opted for a simple-to-read serif font for the body copy, Legacy, to make it easier for the reader to skim if they want. I was lucky because my images were so bright and vivid that the saturated colors also reflect the nature of the league, and I was able to further implement those colors in the text.

Document Grid

I chose these specific margins for my document (Top and bottom: 3p9, left and right: 3p0) because I wanted a feeling of consistency for the shape of the entire page, but I also didn’t want the words to be hugging the edge, so the reader has room to “breathe.” I decided on three columns because my article is relatively long and I wanted the reader to not have to jump around too many pictures and pages to finish, so I decided to keep it to the smallest number of pages possible, while still being creative. To do this, I opted for three columns instead of two. I decided not to go with more columns because I felt it would have the feel of a newspaper, and I want to differentiate my magazine from the typical sports magazines that could be read as news magazines, with lots of text and not much difference in font or style.

Extras

I chose the orange color in Jonny Flynn’s uniform as the basis for my entire spread. It connected all the pages through the use in the deck and subheads. I chose the blue in the headline because it is also Syracuse blue, and opted for the colors in the pull quotes based on the images on the page. The color choice was based entirely on what was already on the page to provide connection between the words and the pictures, so people don’t just skip over the words and look at the images.