Critique: Magazine editing assignment

This past week in one of my non-design classes, we got to be creative. So, I thought I would post my design. We were given a story about medicine cabinets and told to give it a title, external blurb and three internal blurbs. I decided to make my pages into a department style set of pages with a department title on the top left-hand side page and a full-page, user-frield graphic on its coordinating page since this is a popular design for service-oriented journalism in consumer magazines. The design also gave me a chance to keep working with cutouts, which is something I think every designer strives for because it is a common skill needed in many designs. This was also a conservative sounding magazine - FDA Consumer - so I didn't want anything too wild. Just useful and to the point.

Here is my layout:

The title is “Storage Wars,” which gets to the idea of both where should you keep your medicine and how to keep it up-to-date. The external blurb, “Keep your family safe and battle your medicine cabinet this weekend,” further explains the title, so that it isn’t too cryptic. The three design elements I used were subheds in the body of the story, a reference box that could be cut out of the magazine for emergency phone number sand a picture/info graphic with the “Top 8” items readers should have in their medicine cabinet. I picked these three techniques because I wanted an element that would break up the text and made it easier to read (subheds), an element that was useful (phone list) and an element that was visual. I think each of these pieces served their purpose and work well together because they allow for reader interaction and provide information not included in the body of the text but that goes along with the text. I really wanted the dichotomy between the text heavy left-hand side page and the visual element on the right-hand page because it provides readers and opportunity to sit down with the story or just quickly get some information. This variety is important for consumer magazines, and I think this article provides both groups something they can enjoy. It is also a design that could be used in each issue that would provide consistency for the readers.