As part of a design project in IAT 102 Graphic Design students were tasked with creating a spread and website layout. The goal of the project was to learn how to work with grids and implement them into our designs.

Roma Culture is an article based on the rich city of Rome and featured in the Italy travel magazine. The city itself is such a broad topic, so our team decided to focus on Ancient Attractions, Fresh Cuisine, and Unique Sights.

My Role

This project was done in teams of three, my partners were Alexandra Grant and Johanna Jucutan. My responsibilities included developing the content concept of Italian travel, the initial layouts for both print and web as well as the interaction using an Interactive PDF. 

Design

The process of design started with layout sketches of placement. While they didn’t conform to a grid structure the idea of placement and alignment are prominent. They combine similar elements in different layouts of elements. During the process, I continually looked back at the sketches for inspiration and influence over the composition. 

To implement the grid system, I overlaid guidelines and design the composition to align with the grid. To give more dimension to the pages made the photos of the spread bleed off of the page as they draw the eye toward them. As well the placement of the text flows easily from one page to the next with clear readability and no ‘trapped’ text.

Using a modular grid to create the layouts allowed for more flexibility in the composition and therefore there are many different versions of the same page with the same elements, only arranged differently. The various iterations each have their own flow mainly concerning the readability of the format and natural reading path, so to speak. 

Reflection

Upon reflection on this project, I believe that I was able to create a standard magazine layout, utilizing the modularity of grid composition, however, I believe that the website user experience is not optimized for digital use. In other words, I feel as if the website is structured too similarly to print design, and website affordances were not taken into consideration as they should have been.