Design project: Magazine cover

Recreating magazine covers has never been an interest to me, in my 6+yrs of learning graphic design. Which is odd because I always buy magazines as a source of visual inspiration. I guess in a way it seemed really 'played out' since it's one of the most commonly designed things. Not to sound hipster or anything.....

(I just did.......)

Since I'm working on my portfolio, I'm trying to create some versatility. Since I never actually designed a magazine cover, I thought--hell, why not. I even went on to design a little fashion article for it, which took me way longer than I had anticipated.
The cover itself didn't take very long to design, but it does take a lot more thought than you would think. I always thought 'pff' a magazine cover is probably one of the easiest things to design, but boy was I wrong. If you want it to look nice, not boring, and somewhat original, it will definitely take some thought.


First you'll need some inspiration. I went with a fashion magazine, because that's what I love! And holy hell do I have a lot of them.
I used some handy little 'post its' to mark the pages I find the best inspiration from.

I made up the magazine because it seemed like it would be more legit that way. Also, I totally didn't steal this picture of Emma Stone from Vogue magazine........

And here's the fashion article with a bunch of outfits from Emma Stone. I didn't want to do a text based article because I had no idea what I would write about and I didn't want to "Lorem ipsum" it. That's too easy. And although this looks like it was generated with Polyvore, I actually had to construct everything through photoshop. Since you only have a certain given amount of space to work with, you have to consider the composition. I thought it would be easy to just put all the outfits in a section, until I had to put text in. Oh God....I give so much more respect to magazine designers now.

It took me about four hours on this ONE PAGE alone (including the time it took me to gather the resources) but then again, I am really bad at LAYOUTS in general, so inadvertently this turned out to be a challenge for me. Oh well. Good learning experience. I have learned I still hate doing layout.

Day 136: Tiny Beauty

One of my favorite things about photography is the ability to 'macro' shoot objects. This means no matter how tiny an object may seem to the human eye, a camera can always capture the essence of that object through a macro view (aka, zoomed up, with a background blur to differentiate the object from the background). This is probably one of the tiniest flowers I had ever seen, which I mistook as weed (not that kinda weed.....) And I remember why I love photography again.

Day 127: Shinsengumi

Late post, but here it is anyway!
Another ramen post but I've actually rarely eat ramen so it was a nice treat away from my Keto diet. Went last weekend with some friends from out of state who haven't had REAL Japanese style ramen before! Shinsengumi opened up in Little Tokyo and it's not as good as Daikokuya in my opinion (my fav ramen joint) but it's good because you can get noodle refills and have a bunch of toppings in your ramen. It's not the best choice of food on these hot summer days, but it's definitely a delicious choice for a sodium fix!

Day 118: Oxnard has stuff now

Okay, I'm totally late on a bunch of photo updates......but better late than never? Amirite??? 

Last weekend I went to Oxnard with the bf to visit his dad. There's really nothing to do in Oxnard but recently they built an outdoor mall/entertainment center off the freeway so now the city finally has something nice to look at. They also opened up a GEN Korean bbq place, which we went to for dinner. What I liked most about the place was the interior. The food was okay. The price is expensive though.

After dinner we walked around a bit. They're starting to put in some interesting artwork and structures around, so they really mean business to liven up this place! Can't wait to see how the center looks in a couple of months. Right now there aren't many stores open yet, but I assume it's going to be pretty amazing when it's all completed. 

If you've ever been to Victoria Gardens up in Rancho Cucamonga or The Irvine Spectrum, the layout of the place is kind of like that: Outdoor mall with high end and mid end stores with a movie theater and plenty of eateries.