One of my personal projects that I’ve done this year that truly showcases my skills as a graphic designer is my digital and print magazine called Year In Review. 2024 and 2025 have been eventful years for me and instead of posting a series of Instagram photos showcasing that, I decided to make a magazine and write articles based on my experiences. I primarily used Indesign for all of the magazine pages for 2025, and Canva Free for 2024. The photos were either taken from my phone or downloaded from the Internet over the year. Without talking about the specific pages, from a design perspective, 2025 was not necessarily a challenging adventure because I had already known how to make a magazine from the year prior, and because I was working on it throughout the year.
Balancing the amount of words to images harder this year because of my growing skills as a writer. Grid spacing in Indesign was quite easy because you can set up a grid layout immediately, which is why I prefer it over Canva. The magazine isn’t as cohesive as it could have been in terms of theme and design as a regular magazine, but that is because it’s me reviewing how my year has gone and certain subjects required different theming; I also believe personal projects should be works of passion. Passion isn’t a very subdued emotion.
The following are some of the examples from the magazines themselves that I’d like to talk through, explain my design process, and showcase my skills as a graphic designer.
While the purpose of this page was to introduce the music I listened to in 2024, this design also showcases deliberate choices to create an engaging and visually balanced composition.
– Font Selection: The large serif font in gold emphasizes elegance and grabs attention. It pairs well with the smaller, serif body text chosen to describe the year’s music.
– Black Background With Gold Accents: This choice makes the gold typography pop and creates a sleek, dramatic look, and conveys a sense of sophistication.
– Grid-like Structure: The images are arranged in a loose grid, providing balance and distributing visual weight evenly across the design.
I definitely wanted something more professional looking for this page, as music is something that I hold very dear to my heart, and thus went for the sophisticated approach. Also because this was a good year for music and I wanted to showcase that artists are leveling up, and so should how we engage with their work as fans and critics.
As 2025 was the year Kendrick Lamar preformed at the Superbowl, I wanted to write a piece in celebration of his musical career and reflect on my experience with Black music as a whole. This article was also published in University of Waterloo’s mathNEWS paper.
– Typography: The title uses a combination of bold, sans-serif typography and an elegant script font. This contrast emphasizes both confidence in his career and the elegance that comes with crafting lyrics that are poetry into something that sounds more concrete. The body text is sans serif for readability.
– Colour: Quite monochromatic, utilizing shades of blue for this page, save the colour of his skin and his Grammy Award,. However, blue has been linked with wisdom and intellect, qualities that are stereotypically thought the opposite of Black men. Kendrick is a very educated man, shown further in his lyricism. I want to highlight that visually.
