Harper's Bazaar vs. WebMD

It was an interesting evening wandering in the library, looking for two opposite style magazines when I realized the actual challenge was in finding a “real” article in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, which is full of advertisements and graphics. However, this is kind of normal for such a famous glamourous magazine, as being mentioned in their mission statement: “We are fashion. Both a visual muse and an unrivaled source of ownable style. We turn the unexpected into the wildly coveted.” 

I went through this article called “Kate’s New Obsession” on Bazaar’s September 2017 Edition. The article is about the photoshoot Kate Moss did with her then boyfriend Mario Sorrenti for the 1993 Calvin Klein Obsession. The name of the perfume was used for the article’s name as a way of branding and there is also product’s information on the sidebar of the main story’s page. The reason I chose these layouts is not because they were too excellent, but I could clearly find the signature Harper’s Bazaar style in the way typefaces were applied along with the arrangement between typography and images. And while being so “Bazaar’s style”, which is good by the way, the layouts still stood out as a very sexy design that had all the characteristics mentioned in R. William’s book: Good use of white space and color; be clever, clear, and brief.

The 1000 words article takes total six magazine pages, most of which are fill with Moss’s beautiful photos, a very signature design style of fashion magazines. The way the headline and caption covering one whole page is also quite attractive, just as William said: “If your headline doesn’t grab their attention, they won’t read your body copy no matter how big you set it”. The serif font used for the headline is Didot, a very elegant and fashionable one, which can also be found in the magazine’s masthead itself and many other content tittles. And if you have an overlook at that first page, you can somehow realize that the big “O” with the word “Obsession” inside it takes the shape of the CK perfume bottle, which is a very smart and interesting move of the designer.

These layouts also have excellent use of color. The three main color families are black, white and blue, which are very contrast to each other. While black and white bring a classical and mysterious feeling that matches Moss’s outfit on those BW photos, blue evokes a young and strong enchantment of the jeans suite on her other ones. This factor was also mentioned in William’s book: “A good use of color always attracts the eyes when being surrounded by a sea of gray texts”.

If I need to find a few words to describe the design of this layout, they should be “bold” and “lavished”.

The second layout that I chose is an article called “How to crush it” from WebMD’s August 2017 Edition. It is hard to find a more contrast topic to Kate Moss’s romantic photoshoot than a topic about taking on healthy habits in your college life. With the mission statement as “America’s healthy living authority”, this magazine, which has only 1/9 the amount of pages but multiples the amount of texts when comparing to Harper’s Bazaar, setups the layouts is in a totally different style.

It is easy to find the “healthy” hint behind the use of colors in this design. With the combination of analogous colors like green and blue on the white background, feature a young and energetic girl running on a nice day, this layout brings to our mind a fresh and pure breath at the very first glance. The model’s look and outfits are also suitable with the topic about building good habits for your student life.

However, it is also the overuse of color along with wrong choices of typefaces that make the overview of this design look quite confusing. The caption of this article uses the Century Gothic font, with tight kerning, tint blue color and center alignment, seems not belong to the whole layout. Too many layers of texts, photo, and boxes overlapping each other contributes to the lack of free spaces, which is quite unpleasant to the eyes. The bullet points are very distracting and the way they use Arial font for both the headline and the sidebar contents is somehow kind of boring too. In general, this layout has the spirit of the topic and convey the article message pretty well, but still lacks in aesthetics.

In term of visual communication, Harper’s Bazaar did a quite more impressive job than WebMD. However, comparing these two magazines about their design is just like comparing between the outfit choice of a fashion icon and a medical doctor. WebMD’s readers may not care much about its look after all.