Planning- Magazine Title

 Our Magazine's Title 

Helllooooo Bloggggg!

Today, we started talking about possible Magazine names for our publication. We went through many names but I will include our top five below!

We wanted something easy, memorable, and Reflective of our tone, location, and purpose...

    - Fetch Florida

    - West Broward Whiskers

    - Paws & Palms

    - Paw Post

    - Paws in Paradise

using Adobe Photoshop, we tried our 3 favorite to see what they would look like

After much deliberation, we have decided on.... drum roll??....... PAW POSTTTT

Planning- Project Proposal

 Project Proposal

Hello all! 

Introduction

My name is Angely Borge, and I will be working on this project with my good friend Christopher Villegas. We are excited to collaborate and combine our creativity to produce a fun and engaging media product. Since we both enjoy animals and have experience being around pets, we felt confident choosing a project that connects to something we genuinely enjoy.

Target Audience 

The target audience is primarily 16-30 year olds, all genders, pet owners and animal lovers, as well as people who are interested in animal photography, lifestyle content, animal care and more animals related things. Young adults are a strong audience because there are many are new pet owners or considering getting a pet. Furthermore, animal related content performs very well on social media and online platforms making this demographic likely to engage with our magazine. However, our magazine could also appeal to anyone who owns, works with, or is interested in animals.

Social Issues / Representation

In our magazine we want to address

• Responsible pet ownership

• Pet adoption vs. buying from breeders

• Animal welfare and proper care

• Representation of different pet breeds and mixed breeds

We want to promote positive messages about caring for animals responsibly and highlight the importance of adoption and animal shelters. Our goal is to create content that is both entertaining and educational.

Software / Hardware and Skills

To create our magazine we will be using

• Adobe InDesign for layout and design

• Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom for photo editing

• A Canon T8i Camera or T7i and Canon sx740hs camera for all pet photography

We would like to improve our skills in

• Magazine layout design

• Professional typography and font pairing

• Photo editing techniques (lighting, color correction)

• Creating strong cover designs and headlines

Learning more about design principles such as alignment, contrast, hierarchy, and spacing will help us make our magazine look professional.

Basic Plan for Our Magazine

Our plan is..

1. Creating a masthead and magazine title

2. Designing a professional cover page with a featured pet

3. Including possible feature articles such as:

   • “Top 5 Tips for First-Time Dog Owners”

   • “Understanding Your Cat’s Behavior”

   • “Adoption Spotlight”

   • “Healthy Treat Recipes for Pets”

4. Adding interviews with local pet owners or shelter workers (if possible)

5. Designing a table of contents page and at least one double-page spread

Practice Exercises

To prepare for creating our final product we plan to

• Analyze existing pet magazines for layout inspiration

• Practice editing pet photos

• Experiment with headline fonts and color schemes

• Create mock cover drafts before finalizing the design

We are excited to begin working on this project and look forward to creating a magazine that is creative, visually appealing, and meaningful to animal lovers!

Planning- Official Style Guide

 Style Guide

Hello all! Today we are making our style guide that we will use for both issues. After deciding what colors, fonts, and motifs we want to use we are going to finalize it and put it all into a style guide where we will including all fonts, grammar conventions, and audience/ message.

Audience Overview 

Our magazine aims to reach all pet lovers and owner, including advice and comedic pet stories. Using advice from veterinarians and veterinary students we will offer advice to new and experienced pet owners. We will share information and spotlight stories to keep readers entertained and informed. We will keep a casual tone, keeping info easy to access and readability high for quick readers, especially young adults. All ages are pet owners, so lifestyle with pet ownership is what we aim for.

Grammar Conventions

In our magazine production, we will have.....

- No use of contractions, to ensure this magazine conveys a professional and sophisticated image, I will refrain from using contractions in all articles and headlines. 

- No use of modern-day slang, slang is deemed as improper, and to successfully maintain a professional image, I need to avoid it at all costs.

- No excessive use of passive voice. Using passive voice sentences makes them feel slow and unclear. Using the active voice creates energy and makes your articles easy to understand.

- Avoided filler words (like, super, etc), filler words weaken the point you are trying to make and come off as unprofessional. 

Headline Fonts and Colors

For our main theme colors we chose 3 different colors that are bright but not overbearing. They're named banana cream, cornflower, sweet salmon. 

The fonts we went with are Dream Orphans Bold for the headline accents and our masthead, and Amarieta lowercase for our headline normal.

For modules we are using Butterpop for small headlines.

Article Design and Fonts

For all articles, we will use the Baskerville font family for subheadings, copy, and names. here is a list of our specific font sizes and types.

    - Baskerville pt. 11 - Copy

    - Baskerville Semibold Italic pt. 15 - Dominant Subheading

    - Baskerville Semibold Italic pt. 14 - Module Subheading

    - Baskerville Semibold pt. 12 - Names

Design Motifs

For our designs we will use overlapping and varying opacity on different geometric shapes in our main 3 theme colors behind cutouts and headlines. 

We will use text wrapping around both cutout subjects and geometric photos. We will place importance on large images to establish hierarchy.

Planning- My Magazine Design

Design

Hello all! In this post my partner and I are going to decide some design details before we make our official style guide. 

Headline Fonts

Me and my partner wanted to stick to usual pet magazine conventions by using multiple different fonts. These different fronts are going to serve different purposes and we wanted to make sure that we had at least decretive font. We used dafont.com to find a font that we liked, "Butterpop". We plan to use this font in spreads, puffs, and smaller features on the cover.

We have also decided that we wanted to use a combination of one sans serif and one serif font to create a conventional design. For this font we decided on "Amarieta", a serif font that does not have much weight so that there can be a more dramatic contrast. We plan on only using the lowercase version of the font so because the uppercase is much more decretive and thats not the direction we plan on going in.

For our Sans-Serif font we decided on "Dream Orphans". We wanted something bold but not too blocky. To come to this decision we put fonts together in Photoshop paired with Amarieta to see what combinations we like together and we landed on Dream Orphans. It has a funny name but it is longer and it went with our vision so we chose to go with it. 

Color

Using coolers.com, we were able to see what different colors would look like paired together. We created a color palette with a bright, playful tone to reflect the silliness of the pet magazine. We settled on a coral, yellow, and blue that we are going to use for our headlines and different elements of the magazine. Before this, we decided that we are going to have a playful tone with our magazine so we had the colors fit that vision. 

Design Motifs

For our design motif we gained a lot of inspiration from overlapping shapes and shapes like the RGB symbol. We decided to opacity, shapes like circles, and outlines. 

Research- Distribution Practices

Overall Distribution Practices 

From my research, dog and pet magazines use a mix of digital and print distribution methods to reach the targeted audience of pet owners. 

Print Distribution are how many tradition pet magazines are distributed with paid subscriptions that get mailed directly to readers homes, newsstands and retail stores where reader can pick up the product (like grocery stores and retail stores), and at veterinary offices, groomers, and other pet centered places. This approach helps magazines reach readers whoa re already interested in the product.

Digital distribution has come directly from print readership declining. They could be fond on websites like articles and blogs, email news letters that are sent to people who have subscriptions, and social media platforms like tik tok, instagram, and facebook. Digital distribution allows for the reach of a wider audience and update content quickly. 

A specific example of dog magazine distribution is Dogster Magazine. They were formally known as Dog Fancy and they were a print magazine with paid circulation. They were distributed through subscriptions and newsstands, selling over 202,000 copies at one point. print magazines like this mostly relied on  subscriptions and retail distribution. Today Dogster is primary an online magazine where content is distrubuted through their website and email news letters. Dogster’s shift illustrates a broader trend in pet media, moving from print to digital media distribution.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogster 

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/363170

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_newsstand

Research- Table of Contents

 Table of Contents

From what I have noticed from the table of contents I have seen, they are like an overview of the whole magazine on one page. It gives page numbers for the change of chapters or just topic changes. This specific example goes by chapter and points out stand out topics within the chapter. It gives the page number and separates the chapters by color. This one makes it very clear that it is table of contents by the word contents being large, black, and bold on the page. They also always seem to have pictures of dogs or in this case its just one photo. 

The table of contents seems to sometimes include issue months and description or articles. They usually flow with the overall style of the publication, but it is a lesser version of the overall design of the magazine. This is used mostly to draw the reader to exactly what they're looking for, making ti easier and more accessible to the audience. 

In relation to my magazine, I prefer the style in my first example with the one main photo and large texts and color codes elements. This is not exactly how I plan on doing my magazine but it guiding me towrs what im planning on doing. 

Sources

https://allisonsbookbag.wordpress.com/2016/08/03/pet-magazine-round-up-part-1/

https://articles.hepper.com/top-dog-magazines/ 

Research- Color

 

What I have noticed from dog magazines and color is that if the picture is already colorful, they tend to use the opposite color on the color wheel to help it stand out. Like in some examples i've seen, the picture would be purple and the headline and other aspects would be yellow to almost counteract. In one of the examples I provided, the background of the photo is green and the headline is pink, allowing it to stand out. Another thing i've noticed is that these same colors are carried on throughout the entire magazine. Like in the picture on the left, the red creates a bold and strong message from a rather plain photo but this color is continued in more of the cover and the rest of the magazine. The colors are important to maintain the style or the set style guide of the magazine and keep it all looking cohesive. 

Another commonality i've noticed with dog magazines and color is that if the photo/ the dog seems to be in a more natural environment with neutral colors, the colors chosen for text seems to be more neutral and matching the picture. In this picture shown, the dog is in a very brown and dark green area, it would clash with brighter, more bold colors. The person who made this decided to go with white, as it will still stand out with the other colors on the page but it wont be so bright to where it feels unnatural and wrong. 

These uses of colors have made it clear to me what type of color scheme I am going to use depending on what type of picture I take. There are many other factors that go into it like the photo itself. If the picture is outside and neutral, then I will keep that up with the colors chosen to keep it cohesive, but if I choose to go with a studio shoot with bright colors, I will maybe choose to counteract that with another bright color. I also will keep that color consistent throughout my magazine for stye purposes.

Sources

https://shop.akc.org/products/proshop-family-dog-magazine?srsltid=AfmBOornYGweN9Lx4Jxas5yQNoil7W5JyAK8cSHYsSX87rCSzqskCERG&variant=42006116368478 

https://moderndogmagazine.com/ 

Research- Layout Design/ Coverage

 Layout Design/ Coverage

While looking for inspiration to how I wanted my magazine to look like, I realized a reoccurrence with the layouts, they are quite similar to yearbook or newspaper layouts. There is usually a main or dominant picture or cluster of pictures to show thats the "most important" on the spread. This is followed by text to describe the picture or usually something related to it. There seems to be a lot of big and bold headlines to draw the readers attention to what the text is about or what the picture describes. I am heavily comparing this to a yearbook spread, as it seems to have modules similar to those found in a yearbook. These modules could realistically cover anything, but this one for example cover a dog related game plan in the time span of twenty minutes. There is an even balance of photos and text to accompany it, creating balance on the spread. Overall this spread is well spaced, has good coverage, and an adequate amount of text, filling out the page well. 

This is another example of a spread that I found. This spread has photos but seems to mainly focus on text. It seems informational. It is still well spaced and the text is even text wrapped around the dogs legs with more than enough space in between. There are page number at the bottom and the top seems to be labeled with what this spread is going to cover, in this case nutrition. The headline is in all caps and overlays the picture of the dog to bring emphasis. I also notice that they keep the gutter clear to make sure when it printed its not hard to read. This specific spread only has two pictures, but it still works because all of the text accompanies said photos. The text on the left page is right aligned and the text on the right page is left aligned. The picture of the dog also faces the gutter, following a "rule". Overall these layout showed me what I should aim towards when creating my own lay out, hoe many pictures, text placement, folio.