Indesign Article - Zebra

I wanted to keep my article mostly image based as, out of most of the animal options, zebra's appearance are most striking and I wanted to employ that as focal area for the double page.

The image I chose was a bit too complex to set text against without some sort of backdrop. I wanted the image to stay consistent throughout so I dropped a shape over the image with a low opacity, enabling the viewer to see the image but not have it make the text unreadable.

In Life of Pi, the human characterisation of the zebra was a japanese sailor, so by using this as the header, for people who have seen the film they will understand the context of the article, and for someone who hadn't seen it, may want to find out the correlation between the header and the image.

I chose Headliner .45 for the header, a type which in my opinion demands quite an understated attention, especially in the dark subtle tones I used to remain in keeping with the image. It also appeared slightly eroded, with a style similar to that of Japanese letterforms.

I wrote my body copy revolving the film around the zebra and although that isn't the theme of the film it explores the symbolism from an angle that maybe hadn't been exhibited before.

After the minicrit we had in our Design Principles session, I received some good and very helpful feedback, one vital thing being to break up the text, perhaps with dropcaps or subheadings, so I tried both and found that they still worked well together and broke up the large body of text appropriately.

Another point was that I needed to include more images (a minimum of three), but I knew it would be difficult when I had a really demanding image in the background and I didn't want to take away from any part of it, especially the eye in the centre of the second page.

I decided to use a polaroid style incorporation of three more images, much more simple than the main one. By putting them down the side I avoided blocking the eye and managed to avoid breaking up the page too much, which would probably have happened if I placed the images at the bottom of the page.

I was pleased with the outcome, and although I would have liked to include a subheading, it quite overwhelmed the page, given that there was quite a lot of body copy when I finished writing it. I was really happy with the background and I think I got lucky in finding an image that could be wrapped around well.

I would have liked to experiment with the layout more, but I pretty much stayed with my initial idea the whole way through. I would have liked to try breaking up the text and placing it around the spread more interestingly but given the nature of the images in this, I thought it best to keep the text simple.