Lifestyle magazines- initial research and ideas

Eternal

Antiques, re-cycling, old technology re-used, modern items made out of old materials

Antique objects and techniques are given eternal life by a nostalgic revival or recycling them into something new.

raido times 4- Val Biro

Val Biro, radio times. They don't make 'em like they used to.

raido times 3- R F Micklewright

More from Radio Times, this time the illustrator has busy black lines and lots and lots of detail. 

This kind of drawing is going to give you a headache and will take hours to complete, but it's amazing to look at. 

Reminds me of a still for an animated film.

radio times 2- Edward Ardizzone

Edward Ardizzone from Radio Times. Look at the lady on stage at the top, it's like a painting with the dark and light tones.

She's very stark against the blurriness of the background in the stalls.

Then at the bottom we have a railway carriage scene, which I would really like to do one day. The interior and the gestures and costume are very distinct.

I wonder what kind of pen that is.

radio times 1- Bob Sheriffs

Just look at that caricature of Winston Churchill in the lower left of the last image.

Bob Sheriffs was a caricaturist for the Radio Times back in it's glory days when all you had were gramophone and jerries and you bloody well raised a family on two guineas a week.

Bob stands out in the massive Radio Times illustration book because of the contrasting thicknesses of his lines and very expressive figures. His work actually looks quite contemporary, probably because you can achieve a similar effect on Illustrator CS5.

More splash pages

 More from the second project of the year.  I'm using the first one and discarding the second one, despite being advised that it looks like National Geographic (actually I don't think that was a compliment).

I didn't actually do the rest of the article design for the polar bear splash page, which is a shame because  the image makes more sense than a lot of ice, water being a melted form of ice and the article actually being about melting ice.

Anyway, the unused splash page will live on in this blog post, saving me hours I would otherwise waste on useless regret and wondering what could have been.

Which to choose- 2 column spreads

That awkward moment when:

- you make two versions of something and they both have their good and bad parts, so you can't choose which one to hand in at the end of the week.

In the first version I like the splash page better, but the article on the next two pages are horrible (except for the big pull quote on the right, and the image on the left framed by text.

But on the second version I like the blue stripes across the page and the icy banner at the top, but the splash page is crap and the sub-heading is weird.

Also, they both look cold, whereas the whole point of the article is the fact that the Arctic is melting.
I probably should have done a "melting" kind of spread design.