Print and Editorial Creative Brief

For my semester-long project, I have chosen to redesign The Herb Companion, a magazine out of Topeka, Kansas about healthy living through eating fresh, locally grown produce and focusing specifically on the therapeutic powers. It would typically be found in the food/cooking section of a news stand, but a more specific place would be in between the food/cooking, gardening, and new age sections. Currently, the magazine has the look and feel of a pamphlet that you would receive at the doctor’s office touting the benefits of some drug or telling you how to lower your blood pressure. This is mainly due to the unoriginal layout of articles, choice of colors, and typography. One good thing about The Herb Companion is their use of photography, which should be a given for any magazine about food. While they are not the best pictures known to man, they at least display them fairly large and the colors are rich.

Over the course of this semester, I plan on redesigning The Herb Companion so it could compete alongside cooking magazines like, Cooking Light, Food Network Magazine, Food and Wine Magazine, and Bon Appétit. These magazines use modern layouts that convey information to the reader while being eye-catching and fresh. Also, their use of typography is dynamic without being chaotic. The Herb Companion’s typography is frequently boring because every article looks the same. I believe every article is set in the same two fonts. Also, they often resort to heavy drop shadows on their headlines (as well as the masthead), which looks awful and cheesy.

One of the first things I noticed about The Herb Companion is their color scheme, which includes mostly pastel purples, greens, and reds. This choice is the antithesis of what I would expect a cooking and gardening magazine to do. When I think of cooking and gardening, bright and bold colors come to mind.

My ultimate plan is to modernize the magazine while retaining their niche market and without copying these other more established publications. Through the use of dynamic layouts and typography and good bright colors and photography, I will change the look of the magazine for the better and broaden their readership.