Garnet & Black is a student-run publication at the University of South Carolina, published bi-annually. "Intricacies in Stoic Thought" is an article from the spring 2024 edition, detailing stories centered around the theme of Stoic philosophy.
Like other projects involving a publication, I started by reading the copy given to me to fully understand the story being told. This one had a few key figures, the central one being Marcus Aurelius, whose collection of personal writings is a primary source for Stoicism. His status as a Roman emperor inspired me to develop the illustrations to resemble marble statues. To add visual interest, the background of this spread is a pattern based on visualizations of neural pathways, as the article also went in depth about the science behind Stoicism.
As part of a design team, we would hold weekly meetings to give each other feedback. There was a template for copy and set fonts from the style guide but we were given complete creative freedom in the visuals. This went through several iterations. One concern was legibility with the pattern in the background. I mitigated this by making it a different color and lowering the opacity.
As one of my first ventures into InDesign, this taught me to consider how a reader would interact with a spread. The intention with image and quote placement here is to have the reader's eyes run across the whole page.