BA7 - ARTICLES AND ILLUSTRATION.

1. Article from Elle.

2. Beauty article from Elle. 

3. Article from Red Magazine. 

4. Horoscopes from Red Magazine. 

Since this whole week has been taken up by the Curating Dialogues project I feel like my BA7 work has taken a bit of a back seat due to time limit of the current work. I don't mind since I feel like this project has been helping me to come up with other ideas to help out my BA7 work, I think its due to working with someone else and getting a fresh perspective on things. 

Anyway, I thought I would share some photos I took of some magazine articles I found whilst doing my research that contain illustration. I know that illustration within fashion magazines isn't really something that is as popular as it used to be since they always limit it to the horoscope section, as you can see from one of my photos. But I came across a few others here and there from the beauty section, food/restaurant article and then a small poster/article about Karl Lagerfeld for Elle magazine. I was really drawn to the Karl Lagerfeld page (1.) because I like how its very free in terms of type, it's all very loose and they've played with the size, style and composition. I like the mixture of images, drawn and photographic gives it a scrapbook feel which is handily entitled 'Doodle Notes'. 

I don't particularly like the illustration from image 2. but it was nice to see some illustration being used in the beauty section. I think the mixture of photos and drawings does work since it gives the article a different feel, a nice contrast between the images and the text. I just feel that the illustrations are bit 'meh', I mean they're decent illustrations but they don't excite me or are strong enough to balance out the beautiful photographs. Although maybe that was the whole reason as to why they chose them since it's quite a busy layout, so my personal opinion is playing up here, but I do feel like it could have had more consideration towards it as a whole. 

Article number 3. was related to how eating food is all about "the experience" and led to having lots of tiny, to the point reviews of certain restaurants that give you the ultimate dining experience. I thought this was a cute article, something that I would probably read myself or maybe show a friend and I really liked the image used for this since it simplicity was what struck me in the first place. The idea of it is super simple but sometimes that is what works best, a motto that I apply to my own work, plus the combination of a drawing with food just works really well together. It gets the message across about what you'll be reading, clearly a something related to food or eating, but it has the right balance of imagery and objects, if the plate was filled with food I don't think it would have worked as well. 

Photo 4. is usually the only place that illustrations are used within fashion magazines, the horoscope section. This is actually one of the first places that got me into fashion illustrations when I was younger and loved how detailed they were and how many there were! But now they've cut that down to just the 'main star sign' of the month that will have an illustration. I thought this illustration was quite sweet and didn't think that Red magazine included illustrations so it was nice to see! The illustration is of the Leo star sign and I like how it compliments the colours used throughout the text and also the headers for the other star signs. I also like how the hair of the women reflects the mane of a lion which I thought was quite clever and it makes everything tie in together.

Thoughts/points to consider: 

• Colours used can affect the article as much as the image itself - consider what colours are used, does it need colour? 
• Think about the article as a whole. Everything should work with each other, not against (look at image 2.) Does your work compliment the text? Are the images too big? Too small? Also look at the layout. 
• Sometimes simplicity is key. Maybe start simple since it's easier to add than take away. 
• Mixing media can mean including objects or your own photography (image 3.). 
• Images can reflect parts of the text literally (image 4.).