Final zine design development and tweaks

Plan:

After all of my refining and figuring out what was actually going into the zine - I started planning out my page layout. 

I needed to pick a positive article for the content. By this time I had a lot to pick from as throughout the development I had build up a bank of news articles to use. I decided to go with one of the first articles I used about the cat that helps children feel good about wearing glasses as I felt it fit the positive tone best. This isn't really too important, as when I start designing the Instagram content I'll be using more articles. 

I got my paper and wanted to start doing some colour print tests to figure out what paper/ colour ink I want to go with. Luckily before I started printing on my nice paper I did a test on plain A3 to check for anything that needed improving. There were quite a few things that we're really nit-picky but I wanted to perfect:

First Try:

The numbers on the crossword were almost unreadable - too small. 

The smiley face logo/ icon is actually a scan of a hand-drawn one so it has some 'imperfections'. The world icon was digital so it didn't match up.

The article text was just a little bit too small (I think it was 10pt.)

Despite these little issues, the sizing of the zine and everything else was perfect. 

Second Try:

For my second try I played around with the page layout and managed to spread the article over two pages. Everything else was great but on this particular page the ends of the columns didn't match up and it gave a really messy effect that didn't look well designed at all.  

Third Try:

To amend the issue of the columns I aligned them but was left with some awkward negative space at the bottom left hand-side of the page. To fill this, I simply illustrated some more sunglasses to make use of the space. I really like this fix, as it means that the page flows a lot better visually, and it also reminds me a lot more of a traditional newspaper layout with illustrations scattered across the page, very similar to Private Eye. 

Final Design:

Poster side:

I played around with a lot of different type-setting variations for the poster element of the zine. I also tried a few different quotes/ tag-lines but I decided to go with "Happy news from around the world" as it matched the tagline on the front cover.