Portraits: Final Screenshots

Reasons of Final Choice
After much deliberation I went along with my first idea, where all of the emotions are connected by a single line. This is because it had a stronger meaning to it and would fit better with my target audience than my other pieces.
What I mean by this is that when I had a flick through their magazine I realised that they had pretty serious articles, and that there weren't many illustrations (if at all). The illustrations they had were only small thumbnails in their Opinion Letters and these were drawn in a cartoon style.
So I wanted to pick an idea that had an obvious "story", sense of depth, and in a style that would fit in with their articles. The black and white colour scheme gives off a professional appearance as well as looking a bit more editorial rather than a fine art piece. I think that by looking at how editorial illustration's were presented further persuaded me to use this piece because I really liked how Joe Ciardiello did his illustrations and thought they worked really well with text. I wanted my illustration to support my article, not overpower it with bright and bold colours.

Process

As you have already seen in a couple of posts back I have already perfected the design, although left it in the middle of deciding whether or not to have a gradient. So here I have picked up from that point.

Because this illustration would be presented alongside an article I flipped it horizontally so that the people would be facing the article rather than away from it (as the article would be displayed on the right). 

 

When I flipped it I realised that there were some imperfections, especially the eyes of the “surprised” face so I duplicated the illustration and named it “adjustment”. Taking the lasso tool I shifted the eyes around slightly.

However the bottom layer still showed through so I hid the original illustration. I then created a new layer named “added lines” and by using the pen tool I connected some of the lines because when I moved the eyes they were kind of disconnected from the pen lines.

I then took the illustration onto InDesign in the right format for the magazine. Then I added my caption using the Text tool.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to add colour to the piece so I first focused on changing the type colours. I then went onto New Scientist’s website, copied and pasted it onto InDesign, and then used the colours they did. 

  

Typeface Choice

When I looked back at the New Scientist Magazine I realised that they used a typeface with similar aspects to Times New Roman, so I settled with Minion Pro. This is because Minion Pro has serifs - much like the type in New Scientist - but there's also an "elegant" look to it. 

They also used sans serif for their main heading, so I chose Myriad Pro for the title of my illustration.  
You can see more of the reasons for typeface choice in my Typefaces post.

I then played around with different ways of displaying this caption.

I realised I needed to add a darker gradient to make the white border look more intentional, so I opened up my Photoshop document and made it to fit the size of the magazine page so that it was easier to crop it when I brought it onto InDesign. I’m doing this because I realised that New Scientist didn’t like having their photos bleed to the edges.

I then made the gradient a darker grey.

Now these are the two pages I was going to use, but in the end I went along and used the one on the left because it would fit with the magazine more as they didn’t have boxes around their captions on their images.

Conclusion:
The reason for choosing the one on the right was, as I mentioned above, that New Scientist didn't insert boxes for the description of their images, and so I took it out as I want my design to resemble New Scientist as much as possible. This is why I chose typefaces that were similar to the magazine - Minion Pro & Myriad Pro - and I believe that by also choosing the same colour scheme used on their website (as it is consistent) it would relate more to New Scientist. I didn't use the same colour scheme as their magazine as it changes with every issue. For example, the magazine I had use purple and black in the main article, whereas another used black and grey.
I chose a grey colour for the gradient as it's quite "mutual" and lacks emotion, therefore emphasising the emotions shown on the illustration. It also softens the piece so that the black lines doesn't appear too bold against the white background.
The reason for making the grey darker was to emphasise the white border and make it look deliberate rather than something accidental.