Two-page spread final design

Layout Selection

Of the three cover designs from the last blog post, I decided that layout 1 was the best layout for my two-page spread.

I decided to go with this layout because even though all of the layouts have similar horizontal margins, this one does the best job with its vertical margins. The text and image combos snugly fit the height of the page along with the title and infographic as opposed to other layouts which either felt too cramped or too stretched.

Page from IST magazine

The alternating pattern of text and images is a common design pattern found in magazines to integrate images into text, as well as break up the text and make it easier to read. This is especially visible in tech magazines since they have a lot of images.

The infographic in the two-page spread is based on this infographic from Cochlea, and many others like it, that compare decibel values to examples. The one in my magazine just has added stylization to make it look like a volume slider being turned down.

Changes to the Two-Page Spread

Now that I have the general layout for the spread down, I need to style it up. Aside from adding images, there were a few things that I felt needed attention

1. Justify

Instead of just haveing the text be left or right aligned, you can kind of have both at the same time. Justifying text makes it fit into a nice neet box. Most magazines use justified text to help seperate the text into descrete blocks or collums. This helps the text to fit together with the other page elements better and looks realy good.

2. Drop cap

It may be a little confusing for the reader to know where to start reading from. So, what most magazines do is make the first leter of the passage bigger to draw your attention to it. However, this proved to be very difficult with Canva since each text box has to have all the same font (size, color, and style). But with some finiky textbox manipulation and about half an hour of laying around with it, I was able to make a drop cap, and it looks pretty good.

3. Infographic title

Curently, it isn't very odvious what the ifographic is without reading the passage, so I added a catchy tittle: "Turn dowm the sound" to let readers know that it's there to envourage readers to listen to headphones at a safe volume.

4. Images

Finaly, Images were added to replace the placeholders.

This is the final cover design: