Flux; Magazine design

I designed an A4 double page spread for John Walsh's magazine Flux which although was already published I decided to finish anyway just to improve my layout work and to help to understand and navigate In Design a bit better.  There was a choice of three articles to illustrate and design pages for.  I chose the "Unicorns" article just because that was the one I was drawn to most when I read them.  Actually I didn't think any of the articles where much good, I think because I couldn't really identify with them (one was about unicorns, one about Satan and the other was one of those "and then he woke up" kind of contrived piece of fiction.  Anyway, I hand drew a couple of illustrations using a biro and fine liner, scanned them in and made my layout.  I quite like the stark contrast of the two pages.  The illustration taking over one page and the white space on the other really seems to complement it well.  I based the illustration on horse skeleton images that I found on google.   I chose to keep it "dark" because unicorns are usually portrayed as being beautiful and gracious and I wanted to show a cruel and mysterious side - a sort of roguish quality they seem to have - which is also touched upon in the article. 

I made the newspaper collage style cut out lettering from a poster I came across.  I chopped away and added my own letters to form the title, then scanned it in and live traced to get rid of the punk, death threat letter look that is usually associated with this kind of typography.  I think it was Steve Smith who said it was acceptable to steal other peoples work as long as you change it enough so that it isn't recognisable anymore - then it becomes your own!

I'll add the other half of the layout later when I'm finally happy with it.