Magazine Spread Critique

Introduction

This design was made by Hieu Nguyen for Aww Food. Aww Food is a section in a magazine in Australia’s Women’s Weekly Magazine. Hieu Nguyen has her own website and is an art director in New York.

Category Identification

The first typography that is circled is called script. Script is identified by the handwritten look it has in its letters. The second circled portion is identified as sans serif. You can tell when a certain typeface is sans serif because there aren’t any serifs on the edge of the letters.

Typeface Contrast

The first “p” is a script design and you can tell by the flowing look of the letters. The second “p” is a sans serif design which means that there aren’t any serifs on the letters. The difference between script and sans serif is noticeable because script has more curly lettering while sans serif is the same strokes all the way through the letters.

Photography

The type of photography used in this picture is depth of field. Depth of field deals with the foreground and background of a picture. Normally one or the other is blurred making it shallow or deep depth of field. This picture shows an example of a shallow depth of field. We can tell this because the object circled in red isn’t blurred at all while everything in green is starting to be blurred.

Alternate Images

All of these could be put in place of the of the image in the magazine since they are all some type of pasta. All of the photos also have the depth of field like the magazine photo. The depth of field is shallow based, with the pasta in focus and the background out of focus.

Conclusion

The script typography draw your eyes there first which where they should go since it is the title. The sans serif typography works for the body portion of the text because it is easy to read. The photography puts the most important information in the front while putting the things that aren’t as important in the back. For example, the article is about pasta and has a recipe for one. The picture shows the pasta in the forefront and in focus while the salad is the slightly blurred in the background.