So it’s porn spread time. As I mentioned in the last post, it’s hard work for me. I have the same problem I had while working on the drug spreads (“there are too many ideas in everyones’s head about drugs”). But this time, it comes with a second problem that wasn’t a problem for the drugs: You actually don’t want to show anything serious obvious while doing a story about porn.
So I thought a LOT about this. As you can see, I’ll probably go with the butcher. Yesterday already I had the idea of showing meat, but I wanted to show raw beef and chicken meat very close-up in a collage. Then I wanted to build a dollar bill out of meat (since it’s about earning money with porn). Then I wanted to show the YouPorn video frame, but with old paintings of nude women and men in it (because, you know, it’s art). Or greek sculptures. Then I wanted to work with the censor bar in the YouPorn video frames, but without the rest…but that didn’t make so much sense. So I came back to the idea of meat and put one big beef piece on one page and a dollar bill on the next one. And then I thought: “Hmmm….trading meat for money…I think I know this concept…butcher it is!” (I probably though it in German, though.)
I didn’t expect this, but after doing the opener spread (that still needs some improvement, but is ok, I think) the hard work wasn’t over. I felt surprisingly lost while doing the first spread with real text on it. And then I thought about how I’m only putting text in boxes in this magazine issue, and that all my boxes actually look the same. So I did a small “mood board” of all the box styles used in the magazine (see the pic at the top) and then designed a few other possible options how to handle short text blocks. Putting together this “style library” really helped me getting some ideas out of my mind. And I’m looking forward more optimistically now.