Mini Mag :: Final Product

Well the research and inspiration is a finished chapter now. I have spent the time actually trying to create some “art”. i have created my background in Illustrator and I’m now starting to work out how to present it. I have also created the little illustrator flower in Illustrator. I will use this in my magazine as well.

The illustrator icon is created by using a tracing image of the icon. I had some troubles creating the gradient until I figured out how to use the transparency gradient mask and discovered that the grayscale palette dont give a a black colour that is fully black, meaning its not fully transparent. So I had to choose black from the rgb or cmyk palette instead

The wall paper I created in Illustrator is done by using different gradients, shapes and blending modes, blending paths etc.

The first thoughts have also gone into how I might present the first two pages. I’m still not fully satisfied but you get the idea.

I’m still not totally clear on how I want to present the actual tutorial, but I have a rough idea.

Mini Mag :: Inspiration

I went on to buy two magazines to get some inspiration, I got

I found severeal good ideas inside these two issues, they both contain a lot of good tutorials and some creative layouts. I have taken some photos to illustrate my point This first one is an example on how I might present my work on the first two pages. I like the idea of showing the final product on a page of its own, to try and catch attention, especially the dark red work perfectly for that purpose

The next one here could give a bit of inspiration to how I might show the different steps in the process. I like the black square and the slightly rotated screen shots, it adds a bit of contrast and still it fits perfectly within the overall page

Im certainly going to “steal” this idea of showing the steps on the first page. This could go together with the final product and then have a few of the thumbnails beside, showing a few of the steps and leaving no doubts to that this is a tutorial with a start and an end point

I don’t know why but this tutorial was just presented in a way that gave me an idea of presenting the tutorial in a symmetrical manner over the middle of the two pages. I know this is not symmetrical but it just gave me an idea that I want to try out and see if it works without confusing the reader. I think it could work well with the other idea of the black square and the rotated images, but I will have to try that out when I have the images ready

This is the research I have done so far, The idea is to produce a desktop background for a computer. I chose this because it was easy and did not include a lot of steps, so it would easily fit within the 4 pages.