Macho Muscle Monthly App

April 18, 2021
vincenej
The Logo is purposely made in the style of a 1960s’ Hot-Rod Car magazine, which often incorporated red and yellow colors, referencing the colors that a *hot* fire makes. The fonts used here is an italic Hemi for the letter “M”, and Myriad Pro for the rest of the lettering in all caps and also being italicized.
I was assigned to create a persona for a random passion to create. The persona ended up being a fictionalized 30-year-old Hispanic man named Enriquez de la Rodriguez, whose given hobby includes love for muscle cars and scrapbooking. The era I was given to design the product was from 1965. I decided to design- or “invent”- a hot-rod style Magazine that would collaborate with a separately-ordered scrapbook that simplifies collecting specific Parts of a vehicle using the Cutaway pages within a certain issue of a Magazine, making this an Interactive and Unique experience for Muscle Car and Scrapbooking buffs alike. This picture simulates what the actual magazine would look like being used by someone. The image was modified from the original, which is royalty-free stock photography and is used under Creative use.
The front cover for the finalized design of the Triple M Magazine just spells 1960s’, which brought excitement of now-classic cars such as the then-new 1965 Ford Mustang. Note that the picture is deliberately in black and white while everything else is in color, as was nearly all budget-based Hot-Rod magazines of the 1960s’ would start off with in premiere issues as a cost-saving measure for using actual, licensed images on a cover of a brand-new magazine. Back in the 1960s’, Black and White stock images were significantly cheaper to include than it is color, since the limited amount of color printing chemicals were extremely expensive back then, but could be used on brief and affordable portions such as as the front and back covers’ graphic elements, including the logo. This picture in particular is an original stock photograph of the 1965 Ford Mustang made for such a magazine that had since fallen into public domain after lack of usage. Because it was in public domain, it provided me with a free opportunity to take advantage of using authentic material that was actually used in a magazine- if not magazines- as well as not have to worry about copyright issues or plagiarism putting a damper to my Concepts. (PD) 1965 Ford Motor Company
The “Tearaway” pages are the meat and potatoes of this entire project by being the primary ways of using these 2.75. inch by 2.75 inch square boxes to fill the gaps in the scrapbook. Note that the information on the left uses authentic part names from the actual Ford Mustang’s first generation that was marketed from 1964 to 1973. While the Mustang did get a minor facelift in 1968, the parts remained compatible with the slight redesign and available until the end of the first generation. The purpose of the tearaway is to create a hobby for Muscle car enthusiasts to collect part listings specifically made for a scrapbook that could be used to simplify searching for difficult-to-find parts that were rarely advertised in magazines at that era. All the images shown in the tearaway sections are in the public domain.
To accommodate for the tearaway sections on the back page, each square has a label that instructs the Scrapbooker to “Place the Part from This Side to wherever prompted in the Scrapbook.” The 1965 Scrapbook would have a specific listing of which issue the part is shown in and which page the tearaways appear at. For example “Issue #1, Page 119.” To fill the remaining void, appropriately related advertisements would be placed to promote cars, car servicemen, and relevant local entertainment.
The official Scrapbook ad that always appears early in every issue of the Magazine, in this case, Page 4 of the very first issue. This was deliberately made in a dot-matrix style, Black and White only print as another sign of how cheap initial premiere magazines were back in the 1960’s. To emulate the original shades of color in a grayscale-like fashion, Each color was replaced with a specific type of dithering to maintain the brightness values of the colors that they are supposed to represent. This page would be used to prompt new readers of the magazine to join the trend of collecting parts that I hoped to achieve.
A visual mock-up of what the actual Macho Muscle Monthly Scrapbook would look like. Because Cubism was a popular art trend in the 1960s’, the car (or truck if interpreted that way) is drawn in a pointy-ended stylized way many products of the 1960s’ included. Photo used was a Snapshots scrapbook, and the photographer uploaded this for royalty-free and free-use.
Pardon the crude quality of this picture, but there was no other best visual representation of an open scrapbook available that was for free use. Despite that inconvenience, I was able to succeed in making a good representation of what the scrapbook’s features have. The top left corner of the first page (in yellow and red) is for the very first issue of the Triple M Magazine, and mentions parts for the front grille of the 1965 Ford Mustang. Note that the year is intentionally not shown since a new scrapbook would be made for each year to keep up with relevant cars of the era. The big red square boxes explicitly state to “Insert Picture of Part Here. Use Rubber Cement.” The pages would be made from a cheap, but elegant cardboard and only rubber cement can bond the tearaway squares and cardboard together. I designed an additional pocket on the back of the front cover for the user to place a sticky badge to indicate that they now own the actual car parts outside of the cutouts.

Elijah Vincent

Hometown: Middletown
Graduation Year: 2022
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