Layout Design
May 1, 2017
On the Wall is a graphic, street art design magazine created to suit the demographic of 18 to 29 year olds. Inspiration was sourced from street art, pop art and indie design magazines such as Hi Fructose, JuxtaPoz, Plastik and No Cure as they display bold and vibrant imagery in an interesting yet effective way.
It was determined the finalised design of the pages would incorporate black and white colour, alongside vibrant pops of colour sourced from the article's street art imagery. This allowed the ability to manipulate black and white pages and blocks as well as the vibrant pops of colour. This design style ensured the featured designer’s work and street art imagery remained the focal point of the page, due to the Gestalt principle of figure and ground.
The grid layout was chosen to be 3 columns to a page on a 2 page A-4 spread, it was decided that 6 columns would be more appropriate in order to allow flexibility within the design. In terms of printing and binding, saddle stitch was decided as the most appropriate and cost effective method within the intended timeline of printing. The typeface choice and options were selected to be "transparent" typefaces that work in harmony with the street art imagery. This resulted in the selection of Oswald for headings which was later evolved into Archivo Black due to the strong, bold impression it creates with round and wide counters. Solex OT was chosen to remain as the body text with variations of Solex being used for captions. The avoidance of hyphenation, widows and orphans was brought to our attention as a way to introduce clarity and legibility. The combination of these typeface families were decided as most effective with the bold blocks of colour and text in the page composition.