Challenge

LGBTQ Gaming (stylized as LGamingBTQ) is a fictional gaming magazine centering around queer gamers and the content they consume and create.

This magazine concept initially began partly as an excuse to put the joke "the G in LGBTQ stands for Gamers" into an actual project and partly as a way to explore something I genuinely love. There weren't so many thoughts that went into this project at the time insofar as a "professional" magazine and moreso a good way to be very self-indulgent. It started off as solely a Dungeons and Dragons-themed magazine that would talk about different D&D and queer-related topics through it's hypothetical releases.

When revisiting this project I had two specific goals: I wanted to expand the concept of what the magazine is trying to achieve beyond the scope of D&D, and I wanted to make a brand identity for the magazine that didn't have any overt queer iconography as a magazine named in part after an internet meme need not be so serious.

Project Start

To begin I set up a moodboard for the volume itself. I knew several concepts that I would be going into such as the podcasts Critical Role and The Adventure Zone as well as other D&D queer aesthetics so I wanted to keep those in mind. For the magazine in general I went with more general gaming aesthetics.

For the magazine branding I found that what I felt was most important to me when making the magazine was less about D&D itself and more about the queer content that fans made with it and exploring why queer fans latched onto it. So when I began my thumbnail sketches for a new logo the main idea I had in mind was a magazine that focused on queer game developers, fanartists, fanfic writers and players (aka exploring what about this piece of media drew them to play it).

The ideas I decided to expand were the ones based on an analog stick, an rpg text box, and in a hand drawn code font as I felt they all in certain ways encompassed the revised themes of the magazine and all signified ways that people interact with these mediums.

What made me pick the text box logo was that I felt it had the most visual connection to gaming itself, as well as the fact that I could easily translate the text box aesthetic to help tie together the theme of that particular volume with simplified geometric line art. There was also something appropriate to me about a clear rpg signifier in media about queer gaming fans as very often our first experience in dipping a toe outside the closet is through roleplaying games.

The final logo was made with the Pixeloid font which became the main display font for the magazine as a whole.

Roughs and Refining

With creating the magazine I started with making a book dummy which allowed me to get a general idea of what layout I wanted and where things would go.

I then set up a master page that I would be able to use for mass edits and design implementation.

The design I had for the magazine pages at first included size hierarchy but not any different typefaces or color variation, the entire color identity at this point was pink text on a dark background which wasn't very easy to read or highlight important information.

Because I had master pages and paragraph styles I was able to make mass edits to include the new branding identity: a darker neon pink for the text, borders to emulate rpg dialogue boxes, the pixeloid font for display and also for the footer text, and changing the body copy to white so that the highlighted text would be able to stand out better.

Solution

Finally I edited the magazine cover. I added in the new logo, a text box for the title, and changed the font and main color. Because the magazine is intended to be more focused on the players I also flipped the image so the dragon holding a d-20 was now on the back cover while the adventuring party was now on the front.

With this the magazine was now in line with it’s new branding guidelines.

Final Thoughts

I was hesitant to take on this project for a redesign. I remember when I initially made it part of the appeal was how little pressure there was to make something professional-looking. The front cover was something I drew myself and I much more relished a chance to flex my art skills than my design skills. I'm very glad I did take it on because the bones of a good design were definitely there; even if it wasn't the top priority I still cared about making something that accomplished a goal of showcasing a thing I loved.

And in working on this I found it was also a lot of fun to figure out what this kind of magazine would actually have to say and what kind of identity it would have.