Background
This edition of Flourish Magazine was developed for a team class project at Royal Roads University for our COMM 375 Visual Communication and our COMM 320 Professional Written Communication class, which was completed in June 2023. The assignment was a creative project to design a magazine from start to finish and it was submitted as the final assignment for this class. It was a great chance to utilize the layout and design skills I had learned in my Career Prep Journalism Classes in the late 90’s at Port Hardy Secondary School, and my first two years in my Communication B.A. as a Journalism major at Mount Royal University (then College) in Calgary, AB. The team was comprised of four classmates: Kelly Jean, Ashley Watson and Whitney Adnane.
Challenge
The objective was to come up with a monthly magazine for the purpose of creating one edition. To do so, the four of us had to come up with a theme, genre, audience, title and write content/take photos for one edition. We were to assign each other roles and tasks, and write the following articles: How-To, Book Review, profile and travel piece. For each article, we were to provide several visual images that fit the stories and also do an additional photo spread. After the content was prepared, we were to design the layout, using design principles, to create a 12 individual pages or a 6 page spread. We were also permitted to use stock photos in addition to our original photos, as needed.
Result
The four of us successfully designed a professional edition of a lifestyle and gardening magazine for women 20 plus, which we called Flourish. All content is written by the team, and there is a mix of original and stock photos, all edited in adobe photoshop. In addition to writing articles and taking original photographs, I designed the layout of the magazine with Adobe InDesign. My teammates all participated in editing the articles and providing feedback on the layout. It was finalized by exporting and saving as a pdf.
The pdf version of the June 2023 Flourish magazine can be found here.
Flourish Magazine – June 2023
EmilyJoyceWatkins 