Monday, January 23, 2006
Rants: Does JANE design well, or is it just the red type that attracts me...
You Can'’t Miss: JANE Magazine
This week I wanted to point out JANE magazine. I usually donÂ’t read it, but I was at the bookstore and the cover really popped out at me. It i’s cheap, like $1.99, and the cover has four black and white pictures of celebrities on it. Apparently it ’is their celebrity issue, where the celebrities write everything. When I skimmed through the magazine, I was actually impressed with some of the design. The features definitely have a different style, with large pull quotes dominating the page, as well as white text over both a light grey background, as well as a photo (the Alicia Key'’s interview, pg. 80)
Here's the first page of the that feature:
The rest of the magazine had that bad design on par for most teen or beauty magazines. I wanted to mention JANE this week only because it surprised me. I expected really bad design, and I saw a few things that made me think this magazine is actually trying to create good designs--and you have to give them a little credit just for trying.
AGIA Blog
My website is AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, journal. I was really impressed with the articles I found on it, but one that definitely stood out was a discussion about the font used to teach young children how to read. Here is the link.
What they've done is redesign the alphabet with the purpose of clarifying what each letter is. It talked about how children sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the upper and lower case of a letter, for instance they recognize 'r'’ as a letter, but not 'R'’ because they look different. The alphabet-26 takes away those non-matching letters, so that each letter has one symbol associated with it. For instance, the study uses a lowercase a,e, g, I, m and n, while keeping the uppercase B, D, T, etc. I thought this was interesting because it seems so wrong, to mix up the cases, but if it teaches children to read, it has its uses.
This week I wanted to point out JANE magazine. I usually donÂ’t read it, but I was at the bookstore and the cover really popped out at me. It i’s cheap, like $1.99, and the cover has four black and white pictures of celebrities on it. Apparently it ’is their celebrity issue, where the celebrities write everything. When I skimmed through the magazine, I was actually impressed with some of the design. The features definitely have a different style, with large pull quotes dominating the page, as well as white text over both a light grey background, as well as a photo (the Alicia Key'’s interview, pg. 80)
Here's the first page of the that feature:
The rest of the magazine had that bad design on par for most teen or beauty magazines. I wanted to mention JANE this week only because it surprised me. I expected really bad design, and I saw a few things that made me think this magazine is actually trying to create good designs--and you have to give them a little credit just for trying.
AGIA Blog
My website is AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Arts, journal. I was really impressed with the articles I found on it, but one that definitely stood out was a discussion about the font used to teach young children how to read. Here is the link.
What they've done is redesign the alphabet with the purpose of clarifying what each letter is. It talked about how children sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between the upper and lower case of a letter, for instance they recognize 'r'’ as a letter, but not 'R'’ because they look different. The alphabet-26 takes away those non-matching letters, so that each letter has one symbol associated with it. For instance, the study uses a lowercase a,e, g, I, m and n, while keeping the uppercase B, D, T, etc. I thought this was interesting because it seems so wrong, to mix up the cases, but if it teaches children to read, it has its uses.
// posted by teresasanserif @ 8:39 PM 
