Botany magazine

Botany is a quarterly magazine that educates houseplant enthusiasts and encourages them to gain further knowledge of more eccentric plants. It provides inspiration for houseplant lovers to help them incorporate plants into their home, combining interior design and plant well-being.

The brief for this project was to create an editorial magazine on a subject completely of our choosing. We had to research and find appropriate content and typeset all articles and create dynamic and interesting spreads. All images sourced had to be high quality and suit the subject matter. As a houseplant enthusiast, I decided to make a magazine that concentrated on the use of houseplants in interiors and created something that was aimed at wealthier city readers who wanted interesting content but also a display coffee table magazine. The overall design combined elegance and class with contemporary elements and provided an experience for the houseplant lover. The magazine is hypothetical but would be released quarterly with each issue focused on a city around the world with relevant culture articles inside.

As well as designing appropriate editorial pages, I also handcrafted this magazine which included sewing the pages together using a kettle stitch. Print finishes were also added scubas embossing the front cover image and a varnish on the masthead. Part of this project was to consider how the magazine would work as a series and how it would be advertised and marketed. Hypothetical events were created that were plant related and advertised on each cover iteration. All the covers use a variety of high quality photography, illustrations, and paintings on the same dark green background which is striking and stands out. A logo device of the 'b' in the Botany masthead is used split across the spines which line up in the series to create the full device which encourages the readers to buy more issues so that the magazines stack well together and create an item between them on the shelf.

This project allowed me to develop my editorial skills and create more dynamic imagery based spreads which combined different levels of typography. I was also able to experiment with layout using a seven column grid in a variety of creative ways throughout the magazine to allow the content to be engaging for the reader.