Specter Magazine

Class: Editorial Design, Third Year
(school project)

Project Objective

To design a magazine on a topic or theme of choice. The magazine consists of designing layouts for three separate magazine articles in three different ways: one typographic, one illustrative, and one photographic.

Project Concept

My magazine, Specter, is a paranormal magazine, designed to give paranormal-lovers a thrilling and eerie reading experience, both in its reading content and overall design.

Typographic Article

The article I chose to design my typographic article around is about the history of the Ouija board, titled The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board written by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie. The article gives a brief overview of the paranormal game's history, including the game's inventor, Elijah Bond. I wanted the design of this article to look and feel like a historic Ouija board, as if someone (Bond) was communicating to the reader from the beyond.

Illustrative Article

For the magazine's illustrative article, I chose to illustrate and design the spreads around the article by Mark Pickering, titled The Poltergeist That Plagued a North London House. The article explores the infamous paranormal case of the Enfield haunting in England, with claims that a young girl named Janet and her family were being terrorized by paranormal forces in their own home. The article recounts these claims through the experiences of Guy Lion Playfair, a man who investigated the case. I chose to incorporate my own illustrations in order to visualize the family's terrifying claims about what they had experienced.

Photographic Article

The magazine's photographic article is a personal account of NBA player Tim Hardaway Jr.'s paranormal experience at the haunted Skirvin Hotel, titled I'm Not 100% Sure Ghosts Aren't Real. Hardaway explains questionable occurrences that he says happened during his stays in this haunted hotel. Since the article is casually written through his perspective, I felt that including hand-written type throughout the article would help make the article feel just as personal. The use of sourced photographs is meant to visualize the eerie atmosphere of this historic hotel through ghost-investigating and surveillance-like editing and effects.