'HOT off the Street' DPS Development cont.

I changed the title to a thicker and bolder font so that it stood out more.

I also changed the 'personal profiles' title to the same font and the same colour, because on reflection of the 'bubble' it looked out of place and really amateur.

Even though I have everything on the page that needs to be on the page, it looked really empty. Therefore I experimented with some background colours...
This pink background fits in well with the colour scheme of the page, but doesn't look very professional. Also, the bottom half of the page still looks empty, and there's a huge gap underneath the 'personal profiles' title that needs to be filled.

Even by adding in another colour; it didn't fill up the page.

The light blue and light pink colour scheme correlates too well with the front cover, and it looks too 'little girly'. It's not very attractive from a teenage point of view.

Therefore I tried an alternative approach, I added some colour by placing light pink boxes individually behind each of the girls. This looked a lot better than the previous attempt at adding colour, and even though the images overhung the boxes sometimes, I liked the layering effect that it gave.
However, there's still problems with the blank spaces on the bottom half of the page. The personal profiles still look really univiting and boring.

Although I liked the fact that the images overhung the coloured boxes, the text around the girls did not look good.

I then condensed them each onto 2 or 3 lines, and brought them in close to the girls' body. This made the whole page fit together better, and they didn't run into eachother as much - making it easier to distinguish which annotation was for which person.

I thought that the boxes looked quite plan, so I experimented with adding different distances of noise and blur to the outside of the boxes.

I decided on the box with the smallest amount of noise around the outside, and also changed the box shape on the 'Last Month's Winner' model to make it easier to distinguish that she was different from the other girls on the page.

After looking again at my DPS, I thought that the boxes looked to bold and 'stuck on' the page.
Therefore I added a gradient to them, in the hope that they would look less distracting and look like they were disappearing into the page.

Further development of this gradient idea led me to add it to the personal profiles also, but change the direction of the gradient by 180 degrees so that each of the boxes looked like they were disappearing into their counter part.

I then changed the 'Last Month's Winner's' auto shape back to a box because I thought that the oval looked out of place on the page, and it ruined the asymmetrical feel to the DPS.

After looking back at my magazine DPS that I was using as inspiration I deleted all my background box ideas in frustration because I decided that I didn't like them and that it didn't look professional enough.

I then added in 'stickers' that are often seen in magazines, and overlayed them on top of each girl. On these stickers I included a quote from their personal profile about their own style. I like this idea because it adds another dimension to the DPS, and makes it more visually engaging.
I chose the colour light blue because it goes well with the bright pink in the colour scheme, and also goes with the ROHO in the top right hand corner of the page.

I created an advert for the 'ROHO website' and gave instructions to the readers of what they can do to vote for their favourite. I thought that this would be a good idea because I suddenly became aware of the fact that I had provided no way for people to vote for their favourite to become the month's winner!

I created this on Photoshop, and also created a 'Last Month's Winner' title to go above Nicky P that was made with the same colours and style as the advert. This made it clear that the two things were related, and framed Nicky P in a way that it was made obvious she was different from the other girls on the page... Something that I had been trying to do unsuccessfully before with the different shaped background.

I realised that I could easily make the page look fuller by adding the personal profile to the image itself.
By text wrapping the personal profile around each image it gave to two an even stronger link to each other. I then added a seperate paragraph to each that included everything each girl was wearing. This looked a lot tidier than the annotations had previously, and it was easier to read.

I also added little page numbers to the bottom of each page. Something that I had forgotten to do previously, but was an absolute essential! I also broke up the the magazine name and issue from the page number with the same small flower detail that I used on the front cover between the issue and the 'FREE'. I think this adds something a little more special to the page, and the smallest details show that there has been a lot of thought and care taken with the development of the DPS.

I now have created the issue of having even more blank space that I have no text to fill.
Therefore I added in a strip of color to break the top half of the page up from the bottom half... I was hoping that this would give me some ideas of what I could do in the bottom half, but unfortunately I had none.
I also changed the annotations around 'Nicky P' to a similar layout of the 'Name Wears' of the others. I also needed to fill in some blank space around her image, so I asked some of my other friends opinions of what it was they liked about her outfit and displayed them as comments that had been left from 'voters' from the last issue!

Therefore I cropped down the strip of colour so that it just provided a background for the text that outlined how people could vote. This made it clear that this was an individual body of text, and seperate from the other things on the page.

I am going to leave this DPS for now and try and think of some ideas of how I could fill up the space...