Response: Meredith mockups

It's that time!  We're finally getting into our Meredith projects and I have to say that I'm really excited after looking at the magazines the class produced last spring.

I'm lucky to have my roommate in charge the publication of my magazine.  She's been able to give me some extra insight into what she's looking for and what kind of vibe she wants from the magazine.   We're still in the initial stages of our project, and I'm not quite sure we all know what we want to put out, but it feels good to get going.

With the lack of clarity over the magazine as a whole, it was hard to design mockups.  I went to HyVee this weekend and picked up a couple of food magazines that I thought were good examples of what we wanted.

I know most food magazines are simple, but I wanted to stray away from being boring with my design.  I don't think a good food magazine needs to necessarily just have a plate of food on the cover to sell.  I went with a fashion-magazine vibe for my cover and came up with this:

I added a gradient and changed some text, but there is still a lot I want to play with here.  Some comments were that the title font looked too commanding, so I may try to find a better logo that's not so harsh.  The title our publishing capstone came up with is a command, so it will be a challenge to design around that to keep the magazine inviting. Also, I think I may take off the gradient again.  There were some designs I was exploring that had a more playful logo paired with a grilled plate of food, so I may add that to the mockup as well.  

The second design I did was a mock-up feature story on summer cocktails:

I love this design.  I think it's perfect.  The distressed texture of the flag, which I found on stock.xchng, is so interesting and beautiful when paired with the mojito.  As Nick pointed out, a mojito isn't really an American drink, but I think once we know more about the feature story I can find a more appropriate cocktail.

I KNOW!  The last design is very bare.  I wanted to keep the whole magazine very clean, but I think elements can be added without cluttering the page.

We present our mockups to the publishing capstone on Monday to find out who will take on the role as art director, and who will just be designers.  I'll be happy either way!  

Do work!