The first project of the Fall semester was to find a magazine page or an event advertisement, dissect it, and create two diagram posters detailing the page’s graphics and contents.

I chose this page from a Wallpaper magazine as it looked simple, yet the graphics and content takes a bit more thinking in order to analyze it.

For the content diagram, I labeled the literal contents such as the artist information, firm information, and product description. It was at this point that I included a part of the graphics like the title, page number, and body texts, when it was intended for the other diagram.

For the graphics diagram, I color labeled and made few descriptions on how the maker of this page used color, structure, and font to create a graphical composition. Having already diagrammed the actual graphics in the content poster, it was difficult to find other graphic contents in the page. At the end of this iteration, I began realizing the corrections and the differences between a graphic and a content and the proper way to diagram each one.

My understanding of content and graphics, at first, were a bit different to the actual meaning of the project itself. I defined graphics as the compositions of each element in a page(like the background photograph, the texts, and the color) whereas I defined content as the amount of graphic components in the magazine page. I combined some aspects of graphics and content in one poster and completely left out the actual content of the magazine in another poster. In order to fix these corrections, I created another iteration of both the graphics and the content posters.

For the graphics, I made a diagram of the layout design that includes the title, page number, body structure, and even the color palette. Furthermore, I also explained more in depth of why a certain element is placed the way it is, to give the reader a much better understanding of the page’s composition.

I took a different route in making the content diagram by explaining what is being shown in the page, as simple as possible. I started with the main topic in the center of the diagram. I then made connections to what product is being advertised, who made it, and what company they came from. The poster turned out better than the first iteration. It was simple, yet it provided the content and information needed for the viewer.

This project challenged our skills graphically, as well as our thinking on how information is portrayed in a layout design. Moreover, this exercise also gave us an opportunity to warm up our poster-making skills, because visual presentations are essential to any industrial design projects.