Completed Spread Part Two

This is a continuation of the discussion about how my feature spread was completed and why it came out how it did in the final product.

I made decisions based on my sketch. I was on limited time when designing my spread, so I decided to go by the drawing only. Either way, I enjoyed how the sketch came out, and the spread looked nice when making it on InDesign. The only revision I made was the subject of the spread and the miniature pictures on the left page. I had originally thought of making my spread about toys, which are favorites of pets, which could actually be useful to strays, etc. I changed this because I realized that not many people have toys for their pets, but everyone has them eating. I also was planning about having miniature crop outs on the left page, but I realized that because of my style I had limited space, only allowing me to have one picture. Regardless, I like this simplistic, more modern style, and those that I showed my work to agreed.

Throughout the journey of making this spread, I clung to the idea of one page being a picture, the other having the writing. I kept this in mind on my initial sketch to the final product. Evidence in this is this spread taken from an issue of Catster. This shows the design choice that I wanted, and this was actually the initial source of the idea. For this portion, I branched out and asked people that are not in my close circle of friends for access to their pets. I wanted to focus more on pets here since pets are more often fed than strays, and there is more of a owner’s-choice influence on their diets, but the concern for strays is still there. Thus, this journey was one full of pets. I went out and bought a bag of dog food that would be specific to my dog, as this is what my spread discusses. Speaking of the discussion, I formulated this based off the copy writing that I have experienced in my yearbook class.

                I focused on branding by making my magazine memorable, making it stand out. I feel by design accomplishes this. I feel that most of the other students used up both pages to fill the spread with pictures and flood it in text, but mine adopts a much more basic technique. I feel like this is modern, and it is more professional to me. The division between full picture and text is something that is remembered as, like I said, most people would not do this. Plus, that picture is designed to be extremely cute so that it catches attention and makes people go “aww.”

                I primarily used Adobe InDesign to make my spread. This was where I did layout edits, uploaded pictures, etc. The fancier, more aesthetically-pleasing fonts were made using DaFont.com, where I used the Snipping Tool to take example versions of the fonts that I filled with desired text to avoid having to download the actual fonts. I used Microsoft Paint as a way to pull out the light blue color of the dog bib and use it on the right page for a design choice (consistent color).