This year 2013 has brought both big challenges and great changes. It started off as any other year, on New Years, when it was impossible to predict how everything would evolve in the upcoming weeks or months. I will break it into quarters, so it's easier to follow.
January-March
I finally decided what I wanna do with my life career-wise. Photography and Graphic Design are my two greatest passions, so I decided I would try to put them together into one, Editorial Design - I don't really wanna jinx it by saying it out loud, but my goal in life is to create a beautiful magazine with a nice layout, good quality paper and interesting contents (so, from now on, you'll probably be reading more about my ideas for it).
I also started working as a freelance. This was something that caught me by surprise and I found myself doing what I love the most for other people. I was still studying my masters and did not apply for any job, but somehow friends and friends of friends saw my work and asked me to participate in their projects.
We went on an amazing trip to Lanzarote (Canary Islands) which later resulted in a zine I called "The Isle of Moon". This island is so magical and strange that I understand why it's been a residence for multiple writers and artists throughout the years: it's like a big volcanic desert, mixed with lava mountains, palm trees and traditional architecture, and the mix creates such unique landscapes that I couldn't help taking more and more pictures. When we came back to Madrid and I had my rolls developed I thought the connection in each picture in terms of color, texture and, most of all, weirdness was so big that I felt the need to compile it all into a small publication.
I used a horizontal picture and layed it out in such a way that it'd be the whole cover (front and back). I gave texts wide tracking so they would not seem like a white splatter above the picture, since pictures already tell too much information and that would only complicate the reading.
Since there is no text, I decided pagination should have the same style as the title on the front cover, to gain coherence.
I also decided to have 2 different kinds of layout: full-bleed images, or pictures framed on top of other pictures. For the latter, I would have them on b/w so the front pictures have more presence and, also, the b/w rocky background emphasizes the idea of the title, it seems to be landscapes from the Moon.
I wanted to play with the rythm of the publication: there should not be too many spreads with the same layout or they'd become predictable, monotonous. I wanted to keep the surprising effect these landscapes and that was the way I found to do it.
I played around with the composition in the picture on the left and the background: they're not the same picture, yet they seem so. For this effect, I tilted them and changed their original size to make the lines of the mountain coincide (image above).
Again, edges of mountain lines were changed here so it'd seem like the picture is the same, but keeping the colors and differences from each one (image above).
In terms of font selection, i was going for simplicity: the pictures themselves have too much information, and there is no rest between one page and the next (no blank spaces), so to prevent it from a much more difficult reading, i chose Century Gothic. This font is used in front and back covers as well as pagination.
For the back cover (image above) , I decided it should have the same style as both text in front cover and numbers in pagination so i framed it in a box again.
