Changing Faces – The First Double Page Spread

I began setting up my editorial piece by creating an A3 document within Adobe InDesign. I made each page have a grid system with 8 columns to ensure a strong and consistent visual hierarchy across my editorial.

I began working on the first page heavily inspired by my typographical concept, opting to use the TypeKit font Benton Modern Display for a decorative, formal serif typeface. I also sketched a suit and tie graphic and rendered it in Photoshop then Illustrator to create a high quality 300DPI CMYK vector graphic for print.

I decided to experiment a little bit and fill up some of the white space by contrasting the word “GAP” against a black background. I also decided to add the article’s subheading here in the smaller, bold sans serif font Quasimodo, centre-aligned to add balance to the overall composition of the page.

I started the article by pasting in the body text, initially deciding to divide the text across two columns using the font Cambria in 9pt. I pasted the rest of the headline vertically down the latter three columns, contrasting white against black once again to replicate the formal composition. However, I felt this looked very bland to start with and I struggled to create development beyond this point. To fix this, I scaled the text up to 11pt, added a drop cap of four lines to the opening paragraph and spread the paragraph across four columns with no divide. I justified all of the text to reduce rags and tabbed in at the start of each new paragraph to add a clean finish to the text. I added the authors’ names in a small box above the text alongside a graphic to divide the white space further, and added more red to the page in the form of a decorative margin.

I then added a few extra editorial features to this page to finalise it. These features included a bold heading section, detailing the theme of the next section of the article, as well as a highlight from the extract. To add context to the piece, I finally added a page number at the bottom of the page, centred in alignment with the text.