



Redesigning NYLON was hard. Layout is definitely my weak point. I started working on the illustration for the cover first. I got it to where I wanted using some rad photoshop brushes. Next, I took a good look over the magazine's cover, and went to work mimicking some of it's more predominate elements. These were: gradients, colored names, gray colored characters, and the UPC lable. I think the cover came out looking awesome. I added a nice paper texture behind everything to make it look like it was all colored by hand.
The table of contents was where the fight with systems based layout began. Not being the best at these, I took the route of mimicking the layout that NYLON had made. I used their ideas for heirarchy and layout, but took away a column of text, and added my own copy and article names. I learned a lot from doing this actually. Like how the page numbers are the biggest thing on the page, then the article names are bold and smaller, then the explanations of the articles are in a thin version of the typeface being used. It works really well.
The opening spread was a lot of fun. Small amounts of text were a nice break from the toc and I got a chance to really get into the gradients and use really big typography for the headline of the article. This was nice, and a good page to play around on, and not worry about being so formal.
Next, I tackled the two pages of text. This was hard. I'm not super comfortable with this yet, but I think I'm getting better. The first issue was when I went to print it out and everything was HUGE! I downsized the body copy, and printed again...still too big. I finally got it to where it was looking appropriately, then I noticed that the line length was looking TOO long, but then I looked back at my copy of NYLON and thankfully, they had similar non-conventionally long lines of text. Saved me a headache.
In all, I think this project turned out well. It still needs some work and I think that's good. There's a lot of potential awesomeness here to discover later on down the road.






