Fonts used in the existing feminist magazines I have looked at alongside research into protest boards on feminist marches and the chosen fonts for well-known feminist books:
The older protest placards women held at marches are of course in the style of the time using serif types, while the later ones and contemporary feminist books use sans serif and bold, strong clear types such as Helvetica. The hand written aesthetic to the protest boards give a human quality to what they are protesting about which therefore makes the viewer relate more deeply. I'd like to try and create various types for the redesign of the logo Reductress, using both handwritten qualities and a modern bold aesthetic in order for the magazine/zine to have a more contemporary of our time feel alongside a hand-made from the people to the people feel. Something that says professional alongside friendly and relatable.
TYPE:
Recognising that these protest boards use hand written type with a friendly rounded aesthetic, I created some type tests using ink and a paintbrush as this can create sharp thick lines alongside soft, round ones. Both of these emit a protest board feel and reflect different attitudes: eg. first one has more of a satirical tone with the rounded forms and varying line weights of the letterforms, while the second one is a satirical take on the aesthetic of typical tabloid newspaper headline fonts that are big and bold.
Overall, the first one is more appropriate for my magazine as this style of hand drawn type is really common in feminist artwork you see on Pinterest, which is what the target audience are interested in and look at.
Using both type styles would also be appropriate as many feminist zines utilise different styles to emphasise the central elements of feminism (freedom, liberating) and to give a hand crafted aesthetic, which makes the reader feel the publication truly presents real human discussions surrounding the topic.
Lots of different styles of text used in this collection of zine example:
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What should the design aesthetic look like?
What is feminism:
- equality
- choice
- freedom
- emancipation
All of these would be represented best through a variety of bright, vibrant colours to show a lack of constraint and portray this importance of diversity and choice. There could also be a strong use of textures to reflect this. I played around with this in one of my ideas (use of dots below) using collaging and overlay tools in Photoshop which worked well, and found that the use of pink felt too traditional: it is predominantly used in many existing feminist zines and magazines (especially low budget ones) and is the expected colour linked to women. To subvert this, the purples, limes and bright yellows worked really well and definitely portray the sense of comedy more successfully than other experiments. Keeping the saturation on the colours high also gives the design more of a modern feminist magazine feel and links to this notion of 'choice' and 'freedom' linked with feminism.
The use of dots works well with the generally organic aesthetic of this idea and is another way of creating texture rather than halftoning and bitmapping, although it is more distracting than the latter method. It could not be used behind text unless another solid colour form was placed behind the text, which tends to make designs looks less professional and underdeveloped.
Explored two ideas in how to design the aesthetic of the magazine.
1. Nature inspired, organic shapes and collaging with bright, vivid colours. This is inspired by the flower symbol within the logo for Reductress.
2. Modern colours (yellow and red and black), smiley face 'D' logo development to reflect the sense of satire in the articles.
Overall I think there are elements of both ideas that work. The importance of reflecting the satire nature of the blog in the physical design is one thing, alongside perhaps this organic aesthetic as this pretty, nice aspect to the design alongside the mocking articles is a great contrast to make and heightens the satirical element of the magazine.
A lot of peers prefer the smiley face development idea, despite the fact that my aim was to stick with the flower symbol. However, if I stick to using the name and incorporate this nature, organic design within the whole magazine then using this new logo could be a possibility, although the aesthetic of this logo and the nature collages may clash??
With this nature inspired idea I attempted to created various flower logo developments and type ideas using just the letter 'R' and did not find any that particularly matched the tone of the magazine. I became focussed on this idea of being able to incorporate a 3D element into the logo somehow but until I digitally develop these to see how they would look on the page I am not sure they have any value to the project. Here I tried to add coloured paper beneath so that the 3D effect could be seen better however it just di not work the same as it does when you can see it from all perspectives. As a result, I took photos of some of the 3D tests I made with an 'R' and traced it to see if this could create an interesting logo. However, the aesthetic of these 'R's' do not necessarily fit with the criteria I was looking at:
- old but new?
- bold and strong
- organic and roundish?
Putting the article pages together was actually very difficult and I think a lot of work will have to go into making them look professional and interesting.
More tests on colours. Laying these out in different ways also inspired me to look at close cropping and overlaying for a page within the magazine of such. The bright pink, yellow and blue definitely work the best, but for having them together having darker tone images create a sense of figure and ground and depth which is important to have.
PROBLEMS FACED
- Coming up with the appropriate flower logo development and logo change for the front cover. Wanted to keep the flower symbol for design consistency but after creating the smiley face 'D' character I found this reflected the satirical nature of the blog and articles better. Need to find ways of creating the flower in a funny or weird way.
- Working the articles around the designs I created for the pages: I need to think more about the size of the article, how I could place it and then creating images or decoration around this format.
- couldn't transfer smiley face design into InDesign to focus on layout of type and putting in the article as the artwork was too detailed, and although I asked a tutor for help and they suggested putting the actual Illustrator file into InDesign, the image was still really badly pixelated. I ended up putting in filler text into the page layout designs on Illustrator and I feel that this will be a problem in the future when I have designed the backgrounds and images for the pages and will want to put in the article.
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