The Eye of the Designer

When creating any formal layout for things such as a magazine or a resume, design principles must come into play in the design layout. Considering things like proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast are very important to factor in a successful design layout.

Magazine Layout

When looking at a magazine, the first thing that catches a person’s attention is the headline. The headline, “Siren call,” was used very creatively in The Times Magazine featuring Emma Watson. The ‘S’ in “Siren call” is huge and is the length of the full page. The curly style of text makes it look very formal. With the ‘S’ taking up the whole length of the left side of the page, the left column of the body text is wrapped around it. Somethings that could be considered a weakness of the magazine layout is the lack of kerning in the headline and how the ‘S’ is slightly cropped out of the layout. Even though the headline is not kerned, it still looks in sync with the spacing of the letters. With the ‘S’ taking up most of the page, that leaves little space for the body text. The body text looks so small compared to the headline so they could have played around with the sizing of the text a bit. There is a large and noticeable emphasis on the contrast of the black writing on the white background. The ‘S’ is bold and black and stands out because of both the largeness and the contrast of colors. The words in the columns were left-hand aligned which could’ve looked slightly stronger if they were justified to be both left and right aligned as if it were in a newspaper because the layout itself looks as if it could be in a newspaper. Other than the contrast, another strength of the layout could be the two-page layout with the picture of Emma Watson on the second page. For most people, when they read a magazine, the pictures are what makes the text stand out and make worth reading. Overall, this magazine layout was very creatively done however, there could be some fixes.

Resume

When looking at the Resume layout, the last ‘I’ in Christina’s name works like a divider of the page. The strengths in the layout of the resume are that the skills and education portions of the resume are on the left and happen to be right aligned with the ‘I’ divider. Work experience and professional activities are left aligned with the ‘I’. Her name happens to be contrasted from the other words because of the boldness that sticks out the most. It is easy to tell that the creator of the resume must have used slanted guidelines to make this because the distance from the words and the ‘I’ going down the middle look perfectly aligned on both sides. There is a good balance of white space and text throughout the layout. The small subheads, skills and work experience look aligned on a slant although education and professional activities are not. This could be seen as a weakness and look less professional to employers. However, with all the information provided it seems like the layout works the best that it can. The fonts do work well together in this case because all of the important things are bolded and larger or in caps. This layout overall was also well done but can be improved as well.

For both layout designs, the designers used a lot of creativity to make it more fun than just a normal looking post with words written from left to right or in just normal looking columns. Adding creativity to a design layout will most likely catch the eye of the viewer and have them wanting to know more about the article based on the different design that they give. However, too much creativity can get in the way of the viewers attention.