Project | Rolling Stone Issue

Rolling Stone Issue

Editorial

The Idea

The goal was to design my own issue of Rolling Stone magazine that aligns with their established branding and patterns. The challenge was to not stray too far away from these patterns and follow the specs in the media kit for Rolling Stone.

Style guide, which includes the Rolling Stone nameplate, colour palette, and font pairings for the inside pages.

Colour palette I used including red, white, light beige, black, and a light purple-blue.

Font pairings including Parkinson - black, Adobe Caslon Pro - bold, Calibri - bold, and Adobe Caslon Pro - regular

The Guidelines

I bought an issue of Rolling Stone for additional specs and to use as a reference when designing my own issue. I also looked at other digital issues. I made a style guide with the different fonts to use, colours, and patterns.

Sketches I made for the front cover layout.

The Process

I sketched a few covers to get a good idea of the layout. I used a type ruler in the issue I purchased to find all the different font sizes for the heads, subheads, bodycopy, pullquotes, folios, etc.

Front cover variation I designed with Tito Jackson in high resolution with the street in the background out of focus. All of the cover lines are left adjusted along the edge.

Front cover variation I designed with Tito Jackson in high resolution with a solid gray background. The main coverline is centered on the bottom and the secondary coverlines are on either side of Tito's head.

My Covers

I designed 2 different layouts of the cover in Photoshop and decided I preferred the one that I added a background blur to make the figure in the cover picture stand out more.

Sketches I made for potential layouts of my magazine ads.

Ad Layouts

I sketched some layouts for the ads to align with the kind of advertisements found in Rolling Stone magazine.

My Ads

I designed two ads in Photoshop. I made one for Crown Royal and one for Indigo. Rolling Stone has a target market of people who like to party and also people who like to read, considering its text heavy articles.

My Flatplan

I made a flatplan of all the pages to get a good idea of how many spreads I wanted each article to span and where to place advertisements.

Moodboard of images used withing my magazine.

The Images

I found a lot of images to use on Google and credited every source in the folios on each spread.

Magazine on table opening to first page with the table of contents on the left and the opening page of the first article on the right.

Opened magazine on table with ending page of first article on the left and the Crown Royal ad on the right.

Open magazine on table displaying spread of the main cover article.

Rolling Stone magazine sitting on a table with Tito Jackson as the cover feature.

The End Result

I used InDesign to make paragraph and character styles and set the baseline. After laying out all my text and imagery, I adjusted the bodycopy to get rid of widows, orphans, etc. I printed each spread on 17"x11" paper. I was happy with the way it printed, the colours were accurate because I converted all my images to CMYK. I learned that setting preflight rules, paragraph/character styles, and the InDesign document presets makes laying out all the magazine spreads a lot easier and more consistent.

Rolling Stone Magazine is owned by Penske Media Corporation, Crown Royal is owned by Diageo, and Indigo is owned by Indigo Books and Music Inc. I am not affiliated with any of these companies.