Manacon Magazine Multiplatform

Manacon is a magazine created for an upcoming convention that requires the audience to understand what you can expect from this event. I also had to convert the layout onto mobile and tablet. Aside from the responsive constraint, the nature of this project was creatively liberating, allowing me to pursue more experimental compositions.

Manacon is a celebration of everything JRPG’s from iconic classics to modern cult hits. Hosted in Vancouver, the convention brings together fans, creators, and communities for a weekend of games, art, music, and conversation.

Front Cover

Back Cover

Cover

For the cover I settled on a more distressed design as this better encapsulated Vancouver and the PNW, artistically speaking (underground scenes). I utilized the layer blending modes on the typography to further instill the grunge aspect. The use of difference on the shapes was purely for aesthetic purposes and to bring in the blue seen later in the magazine.

The cover was designed to loosely resemble a CD cover to better align with the target audience. The heavy use of red was to signify passion and love, the embers scattered throughout the composition further push this narrative, as fire often is symbolized as love.

I went for a 6 column grid as this would help create the variety needed, without sacrificing user experience once scaled down to mobile/tablet. For better digestibility I spaced out long lines of text to give breathing room. A baseline grid was also deployed to maintain body text alignment

For resizing I used an 8 column grid for tablet and a 4 column grid for mobile, this was done to maintain consistency and alignment for all elements at play. I ensured to utilize white space to give breathing room for the reader.

The most challenging part of this process was maintaining the same view consistency for all mediums, so all readers get the same experience. To combat this I created a more simple layout that was more flexible and altered image dimensions to maintain consistency for all readers.

I chose to incorporate an advertisement within the magazine for more realism, for this I aimed to create a piece that would cohesively fit with the theme.

Due to my target audience being gamers, I played into the “coolness” factor and the skeleton matched with underground scenes that vaguely inspired the theme. The audience already had brand familiarity thus I kept information to a minimum.

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