If you haven’t already, now is the time to collect as many newspapers, newsletters, magazines and brochures as you can. Start by going through them and dividing them into the ones that immediately look easy to read and those that don’t. Is this due to the typefaces used, the way the type is laid out – the number of words per line and the column width, or its alignment?
Work out from your examples what the designers have done to make things more legible and readable. Make notes in your learning log. Then do the next exercise.
Difficult to read
Protein magazine
At first look the structure of the magazine doesn’t look too bad, but as soon as you try to read what is written in the magazine it becomes a difficult task, the words are placed in a very unorthodox fashion which makes it hard to even workout where the sentence starts.
Modern ruins magazine
Even though the image of this magazine is blurry, I wanted to comment on the layout of the paragraphs; the columns are too wide, this would be more suitable for a letter or a book.
Newspaper
This old newspaper is very chaotic, some of the paragraphs have very small writing and very light fonts which makes for a very hard read.
Good examples
The quizzers magazine
This magazine caught my attention, I like how the designer thought outside of the box to come up with a unique layout, the paragraph’s aren’t too wide or too thin either which looks really nice and well ordered.
A piece of pierece magazine
This is a very good example of a good layout. The heading is nice and clear, the paragraphs are broken into well sized columns and the colours of the pictures dont clash with colour of the fonts which I have seen on quite a few designs.
Ready to buy a home brochure
This brochure is perfect. The headings are nice and clear, the way the step by step instructions are broken down makes for a very easy read, the subheadings are in a nice bold font so the reader can easily scan to the part which is most relevant to him and the colour of the font and the background colours go together very nicely.
OCA Graphic Design 