TRUTH MAGAZINE

ABOUT THE MAGAZINE

This years issue of Truth Magazine looks at the stories of people around us facing crisis and recovery. The magazine takes a special look on this topic through the lenses of wellbeing, mindfulness, culture, finance and career. Truth Magazine is a growing project and was created as as extension of Truth Conference - a wellness getaway that encourages people to sit back, evaluate and live their lives to the fullest. 

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Adobe Creative Suite - Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop

YEAR ONE - RISE OF DESIGN PROBLEMS

Summer of 2016 was my first year working with Truth Magazine. The magazine was freshly created and I was one of the very first few designers to begin working on this project. At the time I was very proud of the work my colleagues and I had produced, however looking back, there are many areas where design thinking should have been applied and put to better use. Some of the major faults were; 

  • Each layout was designed individually rather than as a part of a whole. This led to inconsistencies in the themes, colours, fonts, and overall design style from page to page.

  • No overall structure to the content layout. All articles were jumbled together and were not placed in their own categories or sections.

  • Ads were sporadically placed in between articles.

  • Having multiple articles per page is often uncommon in the wellness magazine industry and give off a cluttered, busy and unwelcoming vibe.

  • Lack of white space makes the designs feel stuffy.

  • Text and images were too close to the side margins.

  • Font size was too large

  • Not enough balance between amount of text and sizes of images.

TRUTH MAGAZINE ISSUE #1

Here is a collection of my designs that were used in the first magazine. From an overall glance there is no consistency between each design and each article appears to be apart of a different magazine. 

YEAR TWO - RISE OF DESIGN SOLUTIONS

In my second year working with Truth Magazine, the team and I revisited the previous issue and noted down all the problem areas that needed to be trashed, changed or improved. We then scratched the original design plan from the previous year and created a new one that would allow us to focus more on preparing for the design stage. The plan went as follows: 

  • Previous issue critique

  • External research on other wellness magazines

  • Creating a rough style guide

  • Designing a layout 'bank'

  • Iteration

EXTERNAL RESEARCH

After pinpointing the existent problems, our team and I went on to look at other magazines to find commonalities in design structure, style and techniques. In addition we spoke to industry professionals and looked into online resources to have a better grasp on what the magazine industry expects. By analyzing fellow wellness magazines and looking into design criteria we learnt many rules that we had not applied in the previous year. With this in mind, we made sure to apply our knew knowledge to future designs to avoid making the same mistakes. Some rules that we learnt are as follows: 

  • Use whitespace to create a sense of relaxation and airiness.

  • Colour is your best friend, but not too much where it can appear busy and chaotic.

  • Make use of columns not just for body text but also headings, images and captions.

  • Leave 1 - 2 cm of marginal room between images, text and the page

  • Font sizes range typically between 9pt to 12pt for body text.

  • Ads are hardly ever on the same page as an article.

  • Follow the 30:70 or 40:60 ratio to balance the number of ads to the number of articles.

STYLE TILES

DESIGN BANK

Once we had decided on a style tile (Option 1), we created a layout 'bank' consisting of templates for us to pull from in the future.  While analyzing other magazines we noticed that they were able to achieve a sense of uniformity and consistency by using the same templates throughout the magazine. We decided on creating a total of 16 templates, 8 of which were designed by myself. We also made sure to include pages where we could be creative to ensure that the magazine did not become too repetitive or boring. 

Layout 1

Layout 2

Layout 3

Layout 4 & 5

Layout 6

Layout 7 & 8

ITERATION

Below is a sample iteration process for the table of contents / welcome from the editor spread. Both pages did not follow a layout from our design bank which allowed me to have full creative freedom while designing. The main requirements for this spread was to highlight the feature articles, list of articles in each category, include a welcome note, a photo of the founders and a list of the team. 

TRUTH MAGAZINE ISSUE #2

View some of the final designs right here! Due to copyright I cannot show you all the designs here, but I'd be more than happy to show you in person :) 

LOOKBACK

By working with Truth Magazine, I had the opportunity to learn a lot about the industry and designing for large publications. It taught me how to not only design for smaller individual pieces but for different parts of a whole. It also helped me develop my design thinking skills by forcing me to take a step back and start from scratch.