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Messages - Triple Zero

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All Else / Re: Layout Concept
« on: May 30, 2013, 05:16:15 PM »
I agree with Cram and Sjaako about my cover. The colours came out really well (if I say so myself), in combo with the picture that is nice, the font works well, but the joke is pretty random and obscure.

You use the font, still, if you like. You can get it from here: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Pusab

Please note I used a trick that a lot of magazines use (the guy that used to do layout on my students club magazine taught me this), it works really well and I recommend that you use it for any page that combines bright text with a darker picture background: duplicate the text, put the copy in black behind the brighter colour, moved a few mm down and to the right (try to make this distance less than the thickness of your font strokes), this creates a sort of "shadow" effect, and it greatly enhances the contrast and ease of reading of text on a picture background.

In case of a bright picture with dark text, you can use the same technique but with a white "shadow". It's not quite as pretty, but it does still help the legibility a lot.

In case of the cover picture, I didn't actually use black, but instead the darkest colour I could find in the picture (that was a dark green, IIRC). Sometimes that looks better, other times it's better (or easier) to just use black for max contrast, see what works.

I really suggest you try out this technique with the page about the "Monkey Experiment", it's readable fine right now as it is, but with a black shadow, you get more contrast and the text will have a nice "pop" and clarity, especially in paper print.



on IRC, I gave some feedback on the general layout:

<triplezero> hey, ok I've quickly browsed through the rest of the pages of the intermittens layout, and they are generally really pretty and cool, there's just one thing, I think that a lot of the columns are really too thin. you should be able to have 5 or 6 words on a line, on average, but a lot time you only fit 3 or 4 words

on the pages with 4 columns this would be easy to fix, just use three. but on the pages with 3 columns, I dunno, it seems like you can't always make the font smaller (if you do, best keep the line-spacing/height the same for some breathing room). and definitely do not make the margins smaller because IMO they are also already tight as they are.

probably best to just look at a real glossy magazine and see how they fit their 3 column layouts (I don't know actually, and I don't have one nearby to check)

but I really like that this template comes with all those cool grid lines and blocks and stuff, that makes it interesting and professional looking

<Cram> yeah the template is bad ass
<Cram> it's just frustrating because most of the copy space is for text blocks which are like 200 words long

<triplezero> can't you just only use the types of pages for which it does fit?

IMO it doesn't matter if you re-use a bunch of templates

in fact the few times I made a magazine, I only like had 3 or 4 different types of content pages (not counting the cover, editoral, and such) and re-used them all over the magazine--it doesn't matter because the titles are different and the images are different, and that's also why you can use big take-out quote things, to mix pages up a little.

IMO re-using page-templates is much better than trying to fit good articles into spaces they don't really fit

<Cram> Butts butts butts

<triplezero> You're absolutely right about that, Cram.

As a good example of what to aim for, I think the piece "I heart intangibles" is just about the minimum column width (measured in words or characters) you can go, that one is good, but any less (on other pages this happens) it gets a bit problematic. And personally, I'd decrease the margin on the left side of the page a little bit, to be able to put a bit more space between the two columns



In general, unless this is a lot of trouble, you could solve a lot of the column problems, by decreasing the left/right margins on the page, to make the columns wider, as well as increase the space between them a tiny bit for breathing room.

Also, best to just not use the 4 column templates at all. It's not immediately obvious to me how to make them work without making more than a few tiny tweaks. Just use the template pages that *really* fit the articles and make the articles work well, don't worry at all about re-using some of them for 10 or even 15 pages, if they work well. It's better than the alternative, making a nice article cramped in a space it doesn't really fit.

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