NMG Design
The Brief
A literary magazine that was another final semester project that eventually became a passion project on its own. We were tasked with creating any sort of magazine that we wanted about any topic that we fancied, but we had to do all of the art direction and layout design ourselves. This magazine project was eventually fully printed alongside a promotional poster for the issue release.
NAMELESS Magazine
Bachelor's at Columbia College Chicago
Spring 2024
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Problem
We had to fully plan out and realize a concept for a magazine of our choosing, ranging from informational to literary. I decided upon the literary route, and had to complete the entire planning, direction, and execution of the magazine in two months as a final project.
Design Intent
- Fully realize, through publication, the process of publishing design
- Create a sense of wonder about others that may exist in the world around you by reading personal interviews and written words
- Introduce a different take on a literary magazine that played with the idea of sonder
- Bring about an experimental approach to typography and layout design
Insight
This project allowed me to have a foot in all of the different roles that come with the creation of a magazine. I learned about my own layout design habits, as well as what it may take to create content for a magazine of my own. The subject of the magazine required me to creatively collaborate with different people in my life, and thus create an intimate project that let others see into worlds other than their own.
Outcome
A printed magazine, with an accompanying poster for promotion, that challenges typical literary magazines and layout rules while also keeping the viewer engaged and interested in flipping through the pages.
Process
This an initial moodboard created to guide the art direction of the magazine. The focus was on isolation but also connection, illustration, and large typography.
Here are masthead drafts that were first sketched out and then digitized in Illustrator. The name of the magazine ended up being finalized to be NAMELESS, which both fit with the fact that I could not come up with a good name for the publication, and also that the overall theme of the magazine was about urban isolation.
Drafted here are the aforementioned masthead designs as they may have been laid out on the cover image for the magazine.
This was the pagination document that I filled out to give a preliminary layout design to each spread that I had in mind. This proved to be very helpful in keeping the project on track and in the original format that I wanted as I tend to completely redo entire projects if I don't like their initial version.
I wanted to keep the typeface options variating without too much of a variation that they did not feel as if they fit together properly on the page. I ended up using Poppins and Bitter for the copy and Raleway for all titles of the pieces in the layouts.
These were some layout concepts coupled with possible image placement for the different pieces and articles that I planned to feature in the magazine.
First drafts of layout concepts with actual content applied to them.
Using pictures that I took myself of the world around me while living in Chicago, I edited them in Photoshop to fit the aesthetic of the magazine better. These were just three concepts that I came up with that I thought emphasized the feeling of urban isolation. A variation of one of these cover photos ended up being used in the final rendering.
Drafting out the placement of the selected masthead with the determined photo for the cover, these were the two iterations that I pitched for feedback. The righthand draft ended up being the final draft for this project with an inverted barcode so as to fit better with the color palette and not take too much away from the large typography that makes up the title.
Final Rendering
Accompanying RISO print for marketing of the publication.