Time Out Magazine Mini Task
An editorial task was set whereby we had to choose one out of four magazine covers to redesign. I chose Time Out London. This cover was to celebrate Halloween and we had to bare in mind the current situation with COVID, that a lot of people are unable to leave their homes. This was a timed task that took 2–3 hours, everyone was to then upload their work ready for the show and tell. These mini tasks are extremely helpful as they make me work quickly and not think too much about what I’m doing. It also makes me work with limited assets and utilise these fully, creating anything I can with what I have.
Before I took to Adobe Illustrator, I wrote down and sketched out my ideas. With the theme of Halloween my mind immediately went to black, white and red/orange colours, The Nightmare Before Christmas (controversial), pumpkins, sweets, horror films, cob webs and bats.
With the idea in mind to keep my designs simple but effective, using limited assets, I decided to experiment with negative space. This influence came from Noma Bar as his name and work have cropped up a lot recently during lectures. He uses negative space frequently within his work, creating illusions where multiple scenes are being depicted in one image.
I am happy with my designs for this mini task, I feel I successfully used negative space and utilised the limited colour palette. The logo was given to us to use for the masthead. All of the posters include my own illustrations, besides from Pennywise who was taken from the IT Chapter 2 film poster, had I been given more time for this task I would have recreated this in illustrator to more of a block colour style.
I feel the most successful cover is the ghost. I found inspiration for this through Noma Bar’s style and looking at carved pumpkin picture online. To emphasise Bar’s style, if I were to have more time, I could have found a way of integrating another Halloween element into some of the negative space (for example, in the ‘arm’ of the ghost I could have included the shape of a bat). The Nightmare Before Christmas covers were effective but I feel I could have experimented more with the type. I used the brush tool on Illustrator and hand-wrote the text, although I like this sketchy style I feel it doesn’t fit the ‘spooky’ theme of the magazine.
This task reminded me that some of my favourite pieces of work that I create are made during mini tasks such as this. By allowing myself to not get overwhelmed by information and simply designing whatever comes to mind inspires me to be more creative. I think I often put too much pressure on myself and get overwhelmed by a project (such as the 12–16 page editorial design that is looming over me), but just by breaking things down and making things simpler I remind myself that I am capable of creating things that I am happy with.
