Part B: Magazine Develoment

Written By Amelia .

Generalised Research

Including the first stages of idea generation and the classwork that accompanies it. (the stuff i did before locking down an article basically)

Article and Idea Development

In the end I have chosen this article to base my project off of:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/11/18076272/league-of-legends-virtual-k-pop-new-audience

In essence the article covers how the bigwigs at Riot Games ended up atrracting a whole accidental audience through making really good extra content for their game, League of Legends. But the article doesn’t go into a whole lot of detail- and I got inspired to create something in the same vain- but a little bigger in scope.

The Magazine

Development

First I’m starting of with creating a few of the repeating backgrounds to get the ball rolling- before moving into the spot illustrations/full page illustrations.

Keeping to dark blues and soft golds to help text pop when I add it later, all of these backgrounds were drawn in CSP, a program I find a little easier to use than Photoshop.

All of these backgrounds include the core shapes that appear throughout the League of Legends content catalog, squares/rectangles, diamonds and triangles. Circles are also used in the LoL design- but to bring focus to aspects of content. But seeing as these are backgrounds, I didn’t see it fit to use them for these.

Gradually I’m making my way through pages- and because indesign is breaking my brain a little bit, I am formatting the text and boarder aspects in Procreate and then Placing them in Indesign. Certainly a bit of a roundabout method, but for some reason it works for my strange little brain so I’m doing it- sue me.

For the mainly text / text+ spot illustration pages the design flow mostly follows creating the text, formatting onto the pages (with illus if nessercary), then making funky little league style boarders. Im doing the document at 600dpi A4 and that means I only have 11 layers avalible. Certainly annoying, but it just means I need to be sure about my text and layout before combining the layers and moving onto the next aspects of the design.

For the second how to play page, it has some more complicated illustrations, so I screen-shot the process, following the same process as the other pages, then moving on.

First I organised the text and then sketched out some studies, using the League in game models/seperate model photography to practice their design. The rest of the screenshots follow my drawing of Lux so you can se how I built up all of the portraits featured in the champion recommendations.

Timing and Schedualling

So. This be chonky. The how to play 2nd page took this time to format and draw boarders.

Not to mention the three portraits…

7 hours 48 minuets for one page

*cries in my obsession for perfection*

Ive got 24 pages, 3 are fully completed soooooooooo 8 hours (cause the other pages will fluctuate in complexity) x 21 = 168 hours

It is currently the 7th Jan for me, and there is a 4 day turnaround for printing a binding so 13 days.

I’d need to work 12 hours every day to complete this on time.

Ok so I think I would actually fall out of a first story window if I did that so imma do as much as I can, maybe do a mini print featuring some of my pages and have the whole thing in whatever state of finish it is on the 24th in a fourth blog post after this one.

Front and Back

Ah to the task I’ve been procrastinating. I figured I HAVE to get the front and back done to ensure even if it isn’t finished on the inside when I print it, it will look atleast somewhat presentable. So first:

The Title.

Is cringe. I am horrific at comming up with names so I thought of a few and came up with a wider list to wittle down.

Dev Dot.

Dev Dive

Deep Dive

Content Cave

Data Dive

Game Frame

As you can see, I rely on alliteration alot. I ask a couple of people of what they thought would work best. I ruled Dev and Data out cause it implies something a bit more technical than what I want. Eventually I settled on:

Content Crave

For me it works it is for the people who crave content- a magazine which compiles and presents all related media that might be initially a little scattered across various platforms.

Cover and Back

Cover Thumbnails

At first I was planning that whatever design fell second in my ranking of most liked, I would use as a back cover illustration but I had An Idea. I’ll create the back cover as a tease/revel of the next ‘issue’ of Content Crave- based on Nier. Or Voltron Legendary Defender. Both have hella history that would be fun as hell to draw. If I have a full day after making the front cover I’ll do Nier, if not I’ll do Voltron, because they fluctuate in difficulty in how much I have drawn them and therefore my speed differs.

Cover Design

Ill be combining thumbnails 1 and 4. I’m pretty set on the jinx flare imagry as it managed to get onto Reddits 2022 r/place pixle artwork. Cementing it as one of the most recognisable bits of League imagry.

No, Jinx is not french, however the studio that made Arcane, Fortiche, is!

Cover Process

To speed up the process, I ripped the Jinx pose from a personal sketchbook page of mine, dedicated to Arcane.

Getting the pose correct involved going frame by frame through the original scene and filling in the gaps with my own hand referance material due to shot composition having some elements remain out of frame.

Finished Cover

Back Cover

IM DOING NIER BAYBEH

I’ve drawn the Neir characters alot over the last couple years in various sketchbooks, so I’m going to compile those into a star wars-ish portrait showcase back cover thingie mcbop. I’d do something more complicated with thumbnails and storf like the cover but I have 24 hours = not enough time. Also Nier is a franchise that had one character, 2B, go mental with populatity and pop up everywhere while the other characters and elements fall a little bit to the wayside so she is a nessecary element to include, as well as appealing to a large ‘audience’.

These four illustrations I have done specifically for the back cover- I’ll be popping them into clip studio paint to draww over and then colour.

Back Process

I did not mean to make it so purple. IT WAS MEANT TO BE BLUE TONED. The calibration on my drawing tablet is just forever trying to destroy me so I had to use photoshop and procreate to get it into a better state once I realised.

Finished Back Cover

Illustration Processes

Runeterra Map

Ahri Character Spotlight

Running Out of Time

Unfortunatly, I haven’t been able to finish the magazine in time for the deadline. For some pages I have been able to roughly draw over the sketches and pop those in place to signify what would be there, but for others I have had to leave the spaces blank as I simply don’t have the content drawn. Due to this- as well as the cost I decided not to make a physical copy of Content Crave either. I was becoming overwhelmed and needed to step back- regrettably making me miss the print deadline, but at the time I needed to prioritise my metal & physical health.

Improvements and Reflections

There are many elements of the magazine that I could improve on, content:illustration ratio is probably the element I would most like to reshift within the magazine, as well as making different sections have more distingishable shape/design language. There are a miriad of other examples but for a first attempt at a publication with so many pages, when I have only ever made purely imaged based zines beforehand, I think I’ve done pretty well.

Additional notes:

I like the gradient gold titles I implimented in the htp pages, so I’ll need to go back and apply those to the Introduction and Riot Games pages.

Text Sizing/Type:

Titles: Beaufort | Content: Spiegel

Main Page title - Whatever the hell fits/looks good lmao

Introductory title:paragraph - 12:12

Main Content title:paragraph - 12:10

Now I’ve just noticed that the Controversies title on the Riot Games page is the wrong colour. Guess I’ll go change that to.

Colour Guide! (in hexadecimal)

Text Titles: #dc9c38

Text Substance: #f5c78e

Boarders & Page Titles: #c7a96e #c89a3b #775927 #453614 #e7980a

Research

Due to League being such a big game, there is lots of information about it- but it’s scattereed in little niques that ill need to sniff out and compile for the magazine

Intended for bug reports and player feedback, the support forums have a surprisingly good amount of information that is detailed, accurate and from what I can see, pretty reliable aswell.

The League of Legends official site is extremely useful aswell- information is abound, and they are oddly welcoming of giving tips to anyone who wants to make League styled content- resources I only found through my recent research.

Also I’m looking at streams and content creators to help get an idea as to what to write for the community content sections- which I am also collapsing down from 4 to 2 pages due to not toooo much quality content to fit into the mag.

Below are a couple screenies from Magikarpusedflys youtube channel, and a lolTyler1 stream (all hail the head dent himbo). Unfortunatly Tylers’ setup kinda blocks the UI, so I couldn’t use it for the UI breakdown in the How to Play spread. Big Sadge.

Link Dump

Links I’m saving so that having 20 chrome tabs open doesn’t murder my computer:

League Fundamentals : https://brand.riotgames.com/en-us/league-of-legends/fundamentals/

Support Forums (in-game events): https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415086433427-League-of-Legends-Lunar-Revel-2022

Jinx illu community example: https://www.reddit.com/r/arcane/comments/qywpvf/no_spoilers_i_loved_this_scene_so_i_created_an/

arcane illu community example: https://www.reddit.com/r/arcane/comments/uynv9u/no_spoilers_first_date_pixel_art_by_me/

cosplay k/da community example: https://www.instagram.com/rinnieriotcosplay/?hl=en

k/da illus community examples: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/balDyk

Amelia .
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Part A 250 Words: Image and Text
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Part B: Content Crave: League of Legends