Rolling Stone Issue

Editorial

The Idea

The goal was to design my own issue of Rolling Stone magazine that aligns with their established branding and patterns. The challenge was to not stray too far away from these patterns and follow the specifications outlined in the media kit for Rolling Stone.

Style guide showing the Rolling Stone nameplate, colour palette, and font pairings for the inside pages.

Colour palette with red, white, light beige, black, and light purple-blue. Below it are the font pairings: Parkinson (black), Adobe Caslon Pro (bold and regular), and Calibri (bold).

The Guidelines

I bought an issue of Rolling Stone for additional specifications and to use as a reference when designing my own issue. I also looked at other digital issues. I made a style guide with the different fonts to use, colours, and patterns.

The Process

I sketched a few covers to get a good idea of the layout. I used a type ruler in the issue I purchased to find all the different font sizes for the headlines, subheads, body copy, pull quotes, folios, etc.

Front cover variation featuring Tito Jackson, with a blurred street background. All cover lines are left aligned along the edge.

Front cover variation featuring Tito Jackson against a solid gray background. The main cover line is centered at the bottom, with secondary lines on either side of his head.

The Covers

I designed two different layouts of the cover in Photoshop and decided I preferred the one that I added a background blur to make the figure in the cover picture stand out more.

Sketches for potential magazine ad layouts.

The Ad Layouts

I sketched some layouts for the ads to align with the kind of advertisements found in Rolling Stone magazine.

The Ads

I designed two ads in Photoshop. I made one for Crown Royal and one for Indigo. Rolling Stone has a target market of people who like to party and also people who like to read, considering its text-heavy articles.

Flatplan showing the full sequence of pages and advertisement placements for the magazine.

The Flatplan

I made a flatplan of all the pages to get a good idea of how many spreads I wanted each article to span and where to place the advertisements.

Moodboard featuring reference images and visual inspiration used in the magazine.

The Images

I found a lot of images to use on Google and credited every source in the folios on each spread.

Magazine opened to the first spread: table of contents on the left, first article opening on the right.

Magazine opened to the final page of the first article on the left and the Crown Royal ad on the right.

Open magazine on a table showing the full spread of the main cover article.

Rolling Stone magazine mockup standing on end on a table, featuring Tito Jackson on the cover.

End Result

I used InDesign to make paragraph and character styles and set the baseline grid. After laying out all my text and imagery, I adjusted the body copy to eliminate widows, orphans, and runts. I printed each spread on 17" x 11" paper. I was happy with the way it printed, the colours were accurate because I converted all my images to CMYK. I learned that setting preflight rules, paragraph/character styles, and the InDesign document presets makes laying out all the magazine spreads a lot easier and more consistent.

*Disclaimer: Rolling Stone is owned by Penske Media Corporation. Crown Royal is owned by Diageo. Indigo is owned by Indigo Books & Music Inc. I am not affiliated with any of these companies. This is a concept project.