Planning - Preliminary Design

Design

    Hello! In this post, me and my partner are deciding preliminary design details before we make our official style guide.

HEADLINE Fonts

    Me and my partner wanted to use the conventions of pet magazines by using a variety of fonts but a special importance on at least 1 decorative font. Using dafont.com, we decided on a font called "Butterpop." With this font, we plan to use it on modules on spreads and on puffs and smaller features on the cover.

    We also decided we wanted to use a mixture of 1 sans serif and 1 serif font to create a conventional, but contrasting design. For this, we decided on a serif font without much weight so we could make a larger contrast and have something that doesn't take up much space. We decided on Amerieta, and though it has more decorative upper case lettering, we also decided to only use lower case lettering for the serif font.

    For our sans-serif font, we wanted something more bold, but not too blocky. To do this, we tried a couple fonts on Photoshop paired with Amarieta to make sure they contrasted, but also looked good together. We decided on Dream Orphans, which was kind of a weird name, but it went well for the vision we had in mind of a longer vertical font. 

Colors

    Using coolors.com, we created a color palette with a bright, playful tone that reflects a silliness in our magazine. 

    We settled on a coral, light yellow, and bright blue to have a 3 color palette we can choose from when doing headlines and module designs. 

    Before this, we decided on a definite playful tone for our magazine and it's message, so we fit the colors to that.

Design Motifs

    For our design motifs, we got a lot of inspiration from overlapping colors and shapes like the RGB symbol. So, we decided to use varying opacities in colored shapes like circles, squares, and lines.

    We also decided, as to not take up too much visual space, to only do outlines of these shapes.