Ancient
Civilization
Magazine
A magazine centered around providing insight on prominent civilizations throughout history.
The Overview
History is often learned through textbooks and articles in class which can be dull for most people and can deter them from learning about history in their personal time. Due to this many people are ignorant to the events of our past and hold no interest in learning about it. Ignorance of the past can lead to distorted world views and can negatively impact how people perceive the world.
This magazine title seeks to inform people about the culture that came before us ranging from their living style, to prominent events, and how that culture influenced the world we know today.
The Challenge
With a direction in place content was necessary, I needed to decide which civilizations I should cover and why they were important. I knew that I wanted to cover Mesopotamian culture since that is the earliest human settlement recorded, so deciding what to cover next was the issue. Initially I had thought to go in chronological order from the deep past the the present.
However, I also needed to keep in mind audience interest since not every civilization in history may be interesting to everyone. So I decided to cover the prominent points of history first, the ones that came to mind first were: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Tokugawa Shogunate Japan, Victorian Era, ect. I chose to narrow down to Mesopotamian, Roman, and Tokugawa Shogunate Japan. Thus, I began researching the respective cultures ranging from Britannica, National Geographic, and other academic sources.
The Solution
After finding information over Mesopotamian, Roman, and Japanese culture the next step was to figure out how to compile that information in a way that is appealing to read for the viewer. Alongside this I needed to find imagery to pair
with the text to provide visual information to the reader. For the sources of the images I went to a mixture of different Museum articles and photographer websites for my images.
Before I could begin organizing how the magazine should be structured I needed
to decide how the cover was going to look as that will govern how the rest of
the magazine will be structured. I needed to find a balance between text
and imagery since if one were to overpower the other the magazine may not entice people to read it. A design that I decided on was having the title interact with the composition of the imagery.
For the articles, I needed to keep in mind the context of the images paired with the text. I had to keep in mind the flow of the readers experience throughout the article to make sure everything was consistent contextually.
Cover Exploration
Magazine Articles
Mesopotamia
Rome
Tokugawa Era Japan
