Magazine Layouts

Existing Layouts
I did a web search for magazine spreads and picked out a few that I found interesting from looking at there layouts, colours and content.
I quite like the way this page is set out with the black and white divided, I think it works well as the car is silver so has a lot of tones from white to black, I think the only thing I'm not sure about it the choice of the main title font, I don't think it's a slick font that I would expect from a car ad.

This spread from V magazine consists of one large photo spread across the two pages, I think it works very well as the main focal point of the image is on the side of the page and the way it leaks off of the edges works very well. The simplicity of the type looks good too having the main body in one font type and a small paragraph leading into the story in a slightly larger, different font catching the eye to make you read into it. 

This spread in Miami magazine for a contents page looks good with a lot of white space. I think it has the right amount of image not to many but you get a feel of what's in the magazine, Headers are clear and you can find the information really fast, The positioning of the image and text is also nice and makes good use of space.

RWD Magazine spread, This is very simple but works as a way of including a lot of information but breaking it down with a large image that falls across to the right page. You immediately see the photo then your eye is attracted to the type on the image which is larger than the main body text again to try and draw you in to reading the article.

Another spread from RWD that I looked at was this, again the image comes over into the other page, I like this style and the way the text is laid out with the graphic feature within it.

creating my layouts Using photo shop I opened an A3 file and as each page of the magazine would be A4 I created two coloured sides that were A4 sized so I knew what area I was working in.
I then split one side into three with rough columns as I planned to use a large image spread on the left and text columns on the right so I was using the colour strips as guides.

The image I used was quite large but wasn't quite the right height to fill the whole A4, I managed to stretch it a little which wasn't enough to distort it or loose much quality. 

Using some logo text I found I decided I wanted to have it cut into the image and have that part just over laying the right side of the page, as the text was an image file and wasn't that big I had to stretch it a lot and cut it apart to use it as I wanted to. Using the coloured columns as a guide to the page divide I lined up the cut text vertically along the left side of the right page.

Then zooming in to 200% and selecting the image layer I used the polygonal lasso tool to cut out the space in the lettering. Once it was all cut I deleted I set the text layers to hide so I could see how it looked.

I decided I wanted a cut out image on the right to accompany the text, So using the polygonal lasso tool I marked around the edges and cut it out, when I had cut it out I tried a colour overlay and found I liked it better as a solid colour image.

Using Grey lines to represent text I drew out a space where the text columns would be set. Fitting around the silhouette image. Then adding a header above, I choose to have the title and image text in grey as I think it matches the image well and a page number at the top right corner aligned with the far column. Also adding two images aligned with a text column with the same dimensions to keep the page clean.

Lastly I added a caption on the main image again using the grey tones to relate to the page style.