Production - The Table of Contents

 Hello everybody! In today's blog post I will be finishing up the table of contents for my brief, so what are we waiting for? Let's get into it!

This is what I thought would be the finished TOC, however something didn't sit right with me

It's a lot cleaner and more high definition on the actual program, but that isn't it. It was the colors, the light pink to be exact, the mood it gave leaned a lot more towards Courage the Cowardly Dog and a lot less warm and homey dessert magazine.

It's really annoying to be having a color issue this late in the game, especially because I had multiple blogs about color theory and an entire style guide, but alas, we must revise.

Honestly there wasn't anything special I did, I just took some of the other colors on the page and decided that Chestnut Rose (#D24A54) was the definitely the best replacement 

THIS! Warmth, cohesion, thought and care. It's crazy how a few color updates can completely change the vibe of something. However since the change is so drastic, I think it's fair to get a color AND font update, because that changed a little too.

Here is the new color palette and fonts

Colors:

Chestnut Rose - #D24A54

Light Peach Rose - #FFE6DA

Infared Gloze - #D22D54

Lynx White - #F7F7F7

Fonts:

Catellos

Moonscape

Bondoni 72 (Italics & Bold)

Details

Now, onto my favorite part, explaining all the little details I threw in here. The biggest one being the brownie photo that was no where to be found in my photoshoot. It was actually a photo I took of some brownies a friend made a few weeks back that I took a photo of just in case. All the other photos I took looked awkward in that area, but when I slapped that one in it came out just right.

Then if you look carefully at the background you can see hearts trailing all throughout it. I added this because the blank background made it look very unfilled, even with the photos and text. So I scoured on Pinterest and found this cute overlay of hearts, then I took it into Procreate and made it an actual overlay, then just pasted it into Affinity. It is such a small detail, but I think it continues with the "cute" apsect that all the Hello Kitty motifs on the cover page had. 

This next one might be impossible to see because of the low quality transfer of the image, but in the "Stories" section of the TOC I added a bolded and un-italizied writing of the authors name, to make it stand out against the description, but also made it smaller, so it doesn't completely overtake it.

This really isn't a detail, but I feel the need to mention that trying to decide whether to cut out the backgrounds of the cookie and sherbert was impossible, since the full photo was kind of blocky and clashed with the established theme of the TOC, but the cutout verison looked so half-hearted. I decided to keep the full photo because it gives a little ambiance to the photo (especially the sherbert), but I am considering adding a border to round out the hard edges of the images.

Reflection

 I'm honestly glad that all these little additions and flourishes bring out the most in this magazine, even if it goes a little unnoticed by the regular eye. In my next entry I will be finally writing the feature article and get it out of my face for the rest of this project.

See you all in the next post!