the baseline of typography

As mentioned in a previous blog about the life of typography, we are currently working on a project to create and design a magazine layout. The topic being on words and letters throughout the city. This project as others in the class have found, has turned out to be rather more difficult than we all thought, getting the right column grid structure and a suitable relationship between the body copy, the imagery and headings is more difficult than we all thought. With that said I am still enjoying the project and actually like working on my layout and think that everyone will produce very different but strong pieces of work.

It was at the beginning of the project where our tutor Gary showed us a copy of the Baseline magazine. This was to show us how the a texts in grids, the size, spacing in between each lines, the actual font, captions, the use of white space etc, to show us how a proper typographic magazine works. here he also said for us to think about the legibility, meaning how easy for someone to read the body copy? how can we make the text an enjoyably read? as well as how the actual pages will look.

Having looked at the Baseline magazine I find it to be really good, is very different from other design magazines such as Creative Review and Eye magazine, all have very different styles and layouts and do not all use the same content are even similar articles separating each brand as you could say.

The actual magazine is completely typography based making it more unique and gives a better understanding of how we look at type, even looking at the cover makes it seem quite interesting and appealing. It is obviously a magazine of quality, not just because of the expensive price, but just because of the quality of the magazine itself, the different types of paper used and materials used, the clear and high quality photographs used and well as the detailed articles.

I would say that it is a good collectors item for designers, especially for those who work and enjoy typography. I already have had a subscription to creative review but think that I may soon start one for Baseline.