I'm in a Graphic Design class (typography) right now and for one project we had to take a picture of some celebrity and make a portait of them made out of newspaper text. finding groups of text that make different tonal values and make the portait out of that.
now we have to take that portait and turn it into a 2 page maggazine layout for some fictional (or non fictional) magazine.

Because my soul is still locked away in the vault mine will be from the Massassian.

the original portrait has been blended with the scaned photo here.
And the headline has specific rules. it had to be an oxymoron that somehow related to our person and have appropriatly contrasting fonts.

**please note this has been scaled down ALOT. original is almost 5 times bigger, clearer and nicer**
Here's what I have so far.

I want (if I can) to make a high rez version of this pic and put it in there somewhere.

And I intend to add color, you guessed it, some range of greens.
but i want to get the layout and all the pieces in there before i worry about color.

Any advice you may have will be great.

thanks.

Dang, i wish i had typography assignments like that! So far so good id say. The only thing I dont like are the fonts youre using. I think i could get used to the Main body font as that, but please oh please work on the "The Massassian" at the bottom. Arial is just so boring!

The Grey bar across the bottom is very distracting I think. Oh, and as you get closer to Yodas head, the grey bar blurs where the image starts coming in.

I dont like the blob of black around his head too, it looks out of place.


Looking good!

Thanks for the advice,
Do you think I should use the same font as the body for The Massassian?
Or something closer to the font used here or maby here?

And I see that blurring on the bottom, I think that's just a result of the JPG compression cause I know that's not in the full version.
thanks for pointing it out though.
I'll see if I can make some adjustments and upload a new version before the day is out.

Yea, try one of those fonts, or something similar. If those dont work, try some other sans serif fonts. Im also curious to see what it would look like without that grey bar across the bottom.

ok, Take 2.
This one should be a bit higher quality.

after looking at both I think I like it more with out the bottom bar.

and if you open both in 2 different tabs and click back and forth really fast it looks like yoda is bouncing.

not sure why that happened, possibly the compression? but anyway.

The top left corner feels a bit empty to me, but I can't think if anything to put there that wouldn't make it feel heavy up there.

OOoooo I like what you did to the page numbers! Looks very nice


As for the top left, try aligning the title of the article with the body text. Reposition it like that and it might not look like its too heavy

I really like it, but I think the text needs to be justified (or whatever it's called when all the columns are equal width), and then maybe have some fancy word wrapping around the Yoda picture; even just aligned to part of a circle or something...

I think see what you're saying about the headline, I'll play around with that,

as for the text,
THe thing is, I'm making this in GIMP, which has some pretty limited text options.
it doesn't even do word wrap, I had to add each line break to keep it within the dinemsions I set up.
In class we are mostly useing a Mac program called Freehand which is a vector based text editor, it's really quite powerful but if you're like me and want really specific results, it's hard to get that just because I'm not familiar enough with the program.

and then I'm still trying to keep the text making sense and flowing properly.

If you know of a simpler way I can work with the text to get it to look nice, let me know.

[edit]
So I downloaded the freetrial of freehand and ended up with THIS

Yikes. I like the justification in the first one much better. This one has the text way too close to the image.

I do like the "weak force" moved over though.


My suggestion:

If youre in college im sure your school has Adobe lisences, see if you can pick up a copy of Adobe InDesign. As much as I loathe the program, it does a good job with formatting text easily.

Yeah, the computer labs have freehand, indesign, photoshop and all the others but I really don't care much for them.
Cause I have to go to the studio to use them and they're all on macs so that's 2 strikes and then I can do almost everything with what I have here, sometimes it takes more work but because I know the programs better it still takes less time.
but anyway,

The right column is too close?
is the left alright? I like the way the left one looks now,
it shouldn't be hard to get the other text away.

Another question, I don't read alot of magazines so I'm not sure how much this really looks like a real magazine.
it feels kinda empty but I haven't been able to find much to use as example.
So it kinda feels like I'm missing something that should be in a magazine but I don't know what.

And thanks again for the advice, you've already helped me tremendously.

Sorry to bump but it's done.
SEE HERE

My 8 am typography class lasted til 1pm because I had to wait to print this darn thing behind the whole rest of the class.
My professor showed me some tricks in freehand to get the text to line up better.

So, let me know what ya think.

Whoo, much better again.

Im glad you got rid of the background, it was really bothering me.

This is where my "The only thing I dont like" sentence is supposed to go. But I just saw a few more things.


In the second column, "Republic during its Twilight" has some transparent text behind it which looks kinda distracting.

Also, watch out for widow text! Widow Text is when the sentence starts at the end of the line like this:

This doesnt have widow test. This
sentence does though .


The bolded "This" is the Widow text. Do a shift+enter and it should drop it down to the next line properly


Other than that I think it looks nice!

yeah, funny thing about that background,
on my monitor I couldn't even see it.
guess mine just isn't good enough.
but when I brought it into the lab to print it off I could see it clearly on those.
I just went, "oh, that's what he was talking about."

for the text I was focused more on the shape of it as a whole rather than the individual lines.
I know he won't count off for that, thanks for letting me know.