Ray Gun Magazine

 

 

 

 

 

        

 

 

 

I like the style of Ray Gun magazine and hope to base my final product on their designs, simply because they are so unique and striking. Ray Gun (when it was around) broke the generic conventions of a typical magazine cover more often than conforming to what was most common, but their covers did not look poorly put together despite this, which is one of the main things I love about them. For example, the first of the two Elvis covers has an extremely strange layout in that the title of the magazine is not the biggest piece of text on the page, the image is not centered and cannot be identified easily, and the positioning of the typography and also the barcode do not resemble a classic cover, although this still works somehow and appealed to a certain audience; one similiar to mine, I presume, due to the styles and feature stars used. The other Elvis cover creates a mirrored effect and incorporates bold colours with a neutral background to ensure that the space is not cluttered, as well as positioning text and barcodes in strange places, once again, but making it look enticing and quirky rather than wrong. I like the Iggy + Perry cover because of the grunge look it portrays, which is created by the green tint used to enhance the simple image, as well as the masthead, and the dirty looking, contrasting dark/light colour palette in general. I also like the layout of the white cover, which completely throws traditional magazine layouts out of the window and places an image at the top of the page and fills the entirety of the bottom with cut & paste style text. Most stick to white and black text and then use a colourful background, which is what I wanted to do with my magazine, although I couldn't do this for my draft due to time and the clothes my model was wearing, which I think works well and stands out. The choice of fonts used throughout are all amazing, in my opinion, and because the images are not busy, this allows for bold colour choices and typography. I will refer back to this post when I create another draft.