WHAT IS A LINE?// Design Dev 5

Up until now I have been designing the whole publication in illustrator. I used this instead of indesign because I am very confident in illustrator and can make all the design decisions I need very fast. After the whole thing was finished I planned on importing it all to the correct dimensions in Indesign with inevitable difficulty. This is what I chose to do today, the whole zine isn't finished yet but I now realise that it would have been easier to have made the whole thing in indesign from the start.
Firstly the dimensions have changed from 420x297mm paper to a fairly unique newsprint size of 578x380mm for a DPS. This meant I had to do a fair amount of work resizing all of my images and text to fit on the page, bearing in mind a 15mm compulsory margin around all work. So far I have finished most of the zone and made some big changes with the help of the superior publication editing abilities of indesign.

 Front cover is essentially exactly the same, It also illustrates the 15mm margins I have had to add to every page. This is so the digital printers don't chew up the the newsprint. I quite like the frame its given. One problem I had here is that the image needed resizing, chopping off some of the bottom of the cliff, making it look slightly shorter.

 The inside of the zine was fairly difficult to re shuffle, but ultimately I feel that making all of these adjustments meant that the end product was gong to be much stronger. I cant really comment much more on this dps because nothing has really changed from the illustrator version.

 I found that the previous version of this dps was too empt so I added a title to this page. It links with the content page and simply proclaims 'start'. The font I chose reflects the American themed topic the publication covers so it helps set the tone, and it suits the imagery. I also thought that it would look quite good once printed on newsprint.

 I Changed a fair amount here too, reshuffling all of the right hand page. In this version the list reflects the bulk of the map and the warning reflects the two short paras of text underneath. I like this symmetry and I have come to notice that this is what I have subconsciously done on the first dps above, using 'start' to create some symmetry with the opposite page. Perhaps this is to do with humans natural ability to interpret symmetrical imagery as something desirable.

 On to the crazy page. The ocean of granite meets an ocean of text. I added this pretty long article I found after signing up to some climbing website to the magazine. It describes a climbers first experience of El Capitan, more specifically The Nose route that I have been writing about so far. I thought it would be interesting to add some extra columns to the page and have them line up to the existing text. I also gave the writer credit and a link to his page at the back.
An issue that I knew that I would have here is that once the text becomes quite small it can be drowned in the lightness of the image. To counter this I added a dark shadow underneath the text. This has to be a careful balance because to much dark can look horrible and too light can drown out the text. I was as scientific as I could be about it but I also know that the printer will have trouble reproducing this text. The faint white against all four layers of CMYK could be an issue if the registration is even marginally off.

 I also have that same issue again with crappy image quality. The image has been sized up to its maximum potential so I hope the quality after print is acceptable. This image is at 300ppi when the print company says that the printers will be doing an equivalent of 200 so hopefully this will not be a problem and I just think it is because of this hi-res screen.

 This is the final dps in the magazine. It describes the usual tactics for descending the cliff face as well as how to navigate to the hiking trail to get off the mountain that way. The final page to the right is for note making and also describes the images to its left. The images hope to explain the scale of the wall and the text clarifies what is happening. I also added some final image to the zine to cover the massive amount of free space that I feel pretty guilty about but to also chop the page up a bit.

 The back page copies the title page and basically give credit to the various writers and sources that the zine uses.