Final spreads

These are my final 5 double page spreads in screen view, I still have yet to print the pages and see how they look on A3 paper with the printing marks kept on the page. 

Every aspect of my spreads were informed from research and feedback:

Font:

The font was informed from research into magazine design and double page spreads, where  I read that Aerial pt 11 was typical use in A3 publications, I cross referenced this with the opinions of my peers in the interim crit, and the majority agreed, some recommended that I use a Roman font, to stick with the theme of Christianity, which I experimented with:

I felt it was fitting to the subject of the publications, but it complicated the documents with the serifs and the thin text was yet more difficult to read than the Gothic font Aerial, also I felt that the typeface didn't reflect my target market which was young people, for this reason I chose to stick with Aerial.

I had a running theme of the headers on the page being Aerial pt 21, which were bold and underlined, I felt this was consistent and gave order and a connection to all the pages.

Layout:

The layout of my pages were informed from experimentation which were then re-informed by the feedback given at the crit. From the crit I was given feedback from many that the layout of my text boxes were hard to read and baffling with all the text on the page. It was recommended to me that I made use of four columns per page:

I attempted that on the page which I had taken for feedback, and it made a massive improvement. I felt the need to stick with this layout through the entire series of my spreads.

Grid system:

I had used rulers, margins, grids and a bleed on all my pages which kept them in line, the layout of the page was based on four columns which then made use of text wrap and so did the images on the page, this was very useful, and broken the text up into separate areas which was less baffling to read. 

Theme:

I started with a black and white contrasting theme in all of my spreads and then developed it into using a dark background photograph which looked very effective on the page, and looked a lot more interesting that a block black background.

The white Aerial text worked very well against the black background, so I chose to keep this as a running theme.

I made use of a white line which gradually faded into 0 opacity on every page. The white line was in a gradient style and I placed one on the top and bottom of every spread. I feel this acted as a border but was located higher than the bleed of the page. It kept the page in line and looked good as it contrasted against the background photograph.

Image placement:

Each image on my spread had it's opacity reduced by 10%:

I felt that this made the images less bold and in your face than other wise which I was pleased with, I could notice the difference when looking at all the spreads in conjunction, and 90% was definitely the better choice than leaving the images at full opacity. 

The back ground image had been applied to the master slide which was again reduced to 90% but also placed above a solid black background, which lowered the detail of the image but kept it so the background wasn't transparent.