My Professional Portfolio: Magazine Redesign

For this project we were asked to redesign a consumer magazine using the design process as mentioned in my previous post "Magazine Poster." I have included images of the roughs and mockups so you can see how the design process facilitates the design evolution. Everything is available (including the thumbnail sketches) in hardcopy at your request.

Creative Brief

Renee Thomson

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Project Details:

Start Date: 02.20.2012

Project Name: Magazine Redesign

Completion Date: 03.31.2012

Project Manager: Renee Thomson

Client Contact: Mauve@Mauvepage.com

Personnel Responsible:

Mauve Page will be involved on approvals at all stages of the project.

Project Concept:

The purpose of the project is to redesign Homes & Land Magazine, a monthly publication that provides real estate services to homebuyers, home sellers, real estate agents, and brokers.

Homes & Land features all types of listings, including houses, condos, land, acreage, vacation homes, apartments for rent, and new homes. By viewing Homes & Land magazine, homebuyers can find homes and land for sale in various communities. Home sellers can get real estate tips, find a real estate agent, get a free home evaluation estimate, get information on local real estate market conditions, and sell their home using homesandland.com. Real estate agents can advertise listings, win more listings, and find qualified homebuyers and sellers.

I would like to redesign Homes & Land magazine to give it a fresher, more elegant feel and sense of flow, more akin to a consumer magazine, as opposed to its current design as a trade magazine that resembles a classified ad.

While Homes & Land will remain primarily ad driven, with an editorial formula of 80:20, I would like to incorporate some more aspects of a consumer magazine. For example, I would like to include more in-depth features that offer insight to homebuyers, sellers, and brokers that they will not find in similar magazines, and would like to elevate the design of these features.

In order to make a magazine unlike any other in its class, I would suggest Homes & Land hire one photographer, who realtors will then pay to photograph their listings. This photographer will be skilled in architectural photography. This will create exclusivity, and give realtors the opportunity to receive professional photos of each and every one of their listings. This will ensure all of the images used in the magazine are of the highest quality, a high resolution, and a similar mode, creating unity throughout.

Furthermore, I would suggest that Homes & Lands design all ads using stock layouts. This magazine consists of hundreds of ads, and when each one is different, it can create a sense of incoherence and throws off the unity of the publication as a whole. Instead, each ad will have high-res photos from the on-staff photographer and will use the same font and layout throughout. It is important, however, that H&L still allow Realtors to advertise their individual banners, promoting their personal brands.

While I would like to incorporate some richer reading material in Homes & Land, the publication will still consist primarily of images. This allows the reader plenty of “rest stops” where not a lot of thinking is required, which makes for easy reading.

These new design concepts will create an enjoyable reading environment, increasing circulation and thus making ad space more desirable.

Objectives:

Make the magazine more reader friendly – unity, organization, better articles, nicer/cleaner images and ads
Incorporate more aspects of a consumer magazine
Attract a generic audience – as many people as possible, whether they want to buy a $300, 000 condo or a $3 million home – anyone who is interested in real estate
Attract more advertisers

Audience:

Home buyers
Home sellers
Real estate agents and brokers
Anyone interested in real estate
Ages 20-100
We know that people who pick up this magazine are interested in some aspect of real estate, so we want to provide all information or access to information necessary to encourage them to take their next step, whatever that may be
The realtors are our friends; they are the ones who pay for this magazine and keep it in publication. Therefore, we must attract the buyers, sellers, etc. so that the realtors keep paying us for ad space.

Selling proposition:

A real estate magazine that offers more than just ads; Homes & Land offers expert advice on all aspects of buying and selling real estate.

User value proposition / benefits:

Homes & Land will not just be an alternative to looking at the Sunday Home’s section in your local news paper, it will offer tips, tricks, and services compiled into one publication that will explain the ins and outs of the real estate market so that everyone can use real estate to its full potential as an investment vehicle.

Competition:

News papers – layout is similar
North Shore Outlook
Real Estate Weekly
Homes & Living Magazine
West Coast Homes & Design Magazine
Vancouver Magazine

Deliverables:

Saddle stitch binding, 8.5x11 single page spread, 17x11 double page spread, same paper
These budget-friendly production specs allow us to provide a free publication for the consumers and keep the prices of ad space reasonable so realtors opt to advertise with us as opposed to our competitors
Project is time sensitive – due date 04.02.12

Timeline:

DATE	DUE
02.20.12	Creative Brief
02.27.12	Nameplate and Front Cover thumbnails
03.05.12	Interior spread thumbnails due, Front Cover and Nameplate roughs due
03.12.12	Interior roughs due
03.19.12	Mockup due
03.31.12	PDF of final design due
04.02.12	Final design due printed with rational and creative brief

Design Rational

Renee Thomson

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The driving idea behind the redesign of Homes & Land was to make it a more elegant, reader friendly, consumer oriented magazine, as opposed to its current condition as a trade magazine that resembles a tired classified ad. With the redesign, this magazine could be designated as an Urban Free Circulation magazine.

I wanted to use the same format (8.5x11), cover stock, paper stock and binding as the original magazine in order to keep production costs down. While I want the magazine to have a more elegant look and feel, I think it is important that it remain a free magazine for consumers. The funding for the magazine comes entirely from advertising. Currently the editorial formula is approximately 95:5, and I would like to change it to 80:20 to provide space for richer content.

For the nameplate I went with a traditional serif typeface called ITC Cheltenham, a display typeface, designed in 1896 by architect Bertram Goodhue and Ingalls Kimball, director of the Cheltenham Press. Because the nameplate communicates the Homes & Land brand, synonyms with the publications values and aspirations, I wanted something that was traditional, simple and typographically powerful, and would speak to a broad demographic. Furthermore, sans serif reflects a sense of timelessness, and Cheltenham in particular is versatile, universal, and works with a variety of supporting serif or sans serif fonts.

The colour of the nameplate was picked up from the cover image, and will change with each issue in order to create unity between image and nameplate.

Because the nameplate is a dark red colour with a thin black outline and is separated from the rest of the page, it dominates, successfully appearing as the most important element on the spread (contrast).

I opted to put the cover lines on the top left hand side of the cover page because of the tendency for readers to read in sequence from left to right, the left hand side being the first place their eye looks. The yellow colour is also an attribute picked up from the cover image, and contrasts nicely with the blue background. The most important feature story, “Private Waterfront Sanctuary on Bowen Island” is written in an italic serif font, separating it from the smaller, sans serif cover lines below it.

The use of red (nameplate), yellow (cover lines), and blue (background) on the cover was not accidental. Scientific colour theory has demonstrated that red, yellow and blue, which make up the primary color triad in a standard colour wheel, is the best set of three colorants to combine,

I also used a serif font for the HL logo, used as the kicker and end of story mark. I designed this in Photoshop using the type tool and the paintbrush tool. I adjusted its opacity on the feature story intro spread so it was less dominant than the headline, subhead, and byline, but still communicated the HL brand and created unity with the other pages.

For the body text I choose Archer, a consistent and distinctive slab serif font, which is described as “frank – direct, but not brusque – … [with] subtle cues from the world of typewriter faces … [and] ‘ball terminals’ to the lowercase and … capitals … in order to yield a font that’s friendly without being silly, and attractive without being flashy. The result is a typeface that’s well-mannered, easy to work with and inviting to read” (www.typography.com). I decided to use a serif font, as it is known to be easier to read with a clearer coastline.

For the accent text (sell line, secondary cover lines, magazine price and website, date and floor plan font on TOC, footer and folio, Editor-In-Chief’s name on Masthead, caption/credit on interior spread) I used the sans serif font Gotham Rounded, which is “inspired by signs on buildings, [and] celebrates the workmanlike “draftsman’s alphabet” at a monumental scale. Similarly unadorned, but at a more intimate size, is the lettering of engineering: the marks on precision instruments, blueprints, stencils and templates. Drawn, stamped, engraved and routed, these forms are sensitively captured by our new Gotham Rounded family” (www.typography.com).

I used a cluster of images on the table of contents that had natural affinity with one another, as well as a floor plan to dictate the content categories, which I feel is an interesting design element that could be explored further as a navigation and marketing tool.

The images I used for the interior spreads jumped the gutter and had a common visual theme, and were all taken using my Canon Rebel SLR camera at the same waterfront location on Brunswick beach, which is stated in the credit/caption on the final page of the interior spreads. For the caption I used a different and smaller font than the body text, and it is sectioned off using line markers.

If I could change anything about my final image I would adjust the leading to 12.5/14 as opposed to 12.5/15. I would also correct the duplicated page number on the verso side of the TOC and Editor’s Letter/Masthead. Furthermore, I would delete the duplicated period that appears twice on the final interior spread. I might also find a higher resolution image for the front cover. Due to time restraints and cost restraints, I was unfortunately unable to make these changes.

The evolution of my design from thumbnails to iteration has been a rewarding process. I struggled to find the perfect fonts and images, and am happy with my final results. I feel that this is a successful redesign of Homes & Land, creating a fresher, more elegant appearance, resembling that of a consumer magazine as opposed to its original state as a quaintly designed trade magazine.

Final Cover