Critique...Prototype, the First Draft

This first draft is not as elaborate as I would have liked it to be -- to be honest, I had so many ideas that I didn't know what to do with my ideas. I flipped through a number of different magazines and researched online but it was had to select a design feature that fit my vision. Luckly -- this is just a first draft and I will be dedicating my entire weekend to elaborating on my vision for the formal presentation next week.


Color Palette: When both of our groups came together to discuss what we wanted for the magazine we knew we wanted to focus away from how clean cut Real Simple is in there design, but not to take it to the extreme of a craft/scrapbook design. Thus I selected some bold colors that offered a bit of a mellow side as well. I am a girl that loves color, so I avoided shades of the same color.

Cover 1: Of the two features that our publishing group came up with, my favorite was the idea of a portable party -- or a destination party. Thus, my cover design/photo is inspired by their suggestion of a rooftop party. If given the option of working with a photographer and actually shooting a rooftop party I would have liked to have people actually in the photo, but in my search for the perfect cover photo all those with people in them were not classy enough for a cover. 

Cover 2: Their second suggestion was for digital invitations -- a wonderful story idea, but more difficult to translate into a cover then I thought. I know I have a way to go on translating this correctly, but here is my though process on this cover: using a paper invitation on the cover and on the spread, recreating the paper invitation for digital distribution.

Feature Spread: This feature spread is meant to go with the first cover I designed. Each of a number of spreads would show the read how to put together a different "portable" party -- i.e. the beach, a rooftop, tailgate party, etc. My sidebar needs a lot of work -- but what I got to before the midnight deadline was to include a center piece, a party favor and (although I don't have it on my spread here) a food item. In addition, for other spreads of the feature I thought it would be good to have a sidebar on a possible party game/activity.

Department Page: Cheers! This was my favorite page to design, because -- regardless of whether we want to admit it -- what we are drinking at a party can be more important than anything else about the party. 

Between my feature and department pages I kept the design element of the six overlapping circles in an effort to suggest that everything has an overlapping connection within a plan/presentation of a party -- an in itself, everything comes full circle from the start to the finish of a party.