LUCHADORA
EDUCATIONAL CULTURE MAGAZINE
Luchadora is the Chicana experience. It is an accumulation of art, research, and history. Made by a Chicana, for Chicanas to share and educate. Welcoming all who wish to take part. This publication highlights the beauty and power of Chicana culture. Celebrating our collective experiences and educating those who wish to join the fight. When creating this collection of culture, I focused on Chicana feminism and the politics it entails. This publication is an elevated seasonal publication, illustrated, written and designed by me, Burdie.
RESEARCH
This entire publication is the result of a semester worth of research over Lucha Libre culture, Chicana Feminism, Chicana/o history and publication design. The books that most of research has been based on include; Chicana and Chicano Art by Carlos Francisco Jackson, Intersectional Chicana Feminism By Aida Hurtado, and Voicing Chicana Feminism: Young Women speak out on Sexuality and identity By Aida Hurtado. This publication not only took serious research over Chicana Feminism but is also a compilation of Chicana experiences from myself and other Chicanas I have had the pleasure of meeting. I also had to research other art and culture magazine to see how to properly execute a beautifully serious publication that can be playful and welcoming but also tackle serious topics.
COMPETITION
SPECIAL EDITION APERTURE 245
Highlighting Latinx stories, this publication uses photography and text to tell the personal experiences of the Latinx community. Uses minimal design to showcase the content, and somber mood it is more article based. Minimal color and design elements.
LATINA
Publication and web page LATINA highlights the experiences of Latinas all over the world. Culture and woman based, they use color and bold text to highlight the message. Including a Broader audience, so it touches on more subjects and as well as topic unrelated to Latina culture.
PLANNING
Once the research was done, it was time to focus on the branding and planning of the magazine. The journey of finding the tone, brand voice, name, type, style and logo was a long one that seemed to never end. The magazine changed and adapted style throughout the magazine, especially the type and logo. Finding a type that represented Chicana culture but didn't feed into Mexican sterotypes was the challenge.
Luchadora Moodboard
Most of the type either didn't fit the tone or was too obvious. The solution to this wasn't to find type that looked "Mexican" but to find type that was created by Chicanas. Most of the type used in this publication (only exception is body copy) is produced by Latinx type foundries. Digging into the main message of the publication "Made by Chicanas for Chicanas" and taking it literally helped guide me through this tricky situation of balancing too much culture and just enough. Same goes to the illustration style, it was tough to find one set style to illustrated the whole magazine, but once I focused in on style it was easier to pair everything together.
First Version of Magazine Flatplan
LOGO
The Logo for the publication probably went through the most changes. The type changed, the lockup changed, almsot evrything changed, so that it would fit well on the cover and fit the brand voice. Like stated before finding a balance in the type that didn't scream stereotype but still represented the culture was the focus. We went from a decorative typeface that is actually named "Luchador" , which was beautiful but was too obvious and didn't portray a loud tone I was searching for. I finally settled on the typeface "Brother" positioned in a lockup that screams loud Luchadora.
Final Magazine Style Guide
COVER
Final Cover
SKELETON SPREAD
ILLUSTRATIONS
EVALUATION
This magazine is apart of a larger project based on Chicana Feminism, and It is a great way to display all the research I have conducted. Tackling the project of creating a magazine from scratch, building all assets is a very ambitious choice but it is one I am glad I made. This publication is my unique way of creating a culture education magazine that is welcoming, and playful in my unique style, but still tackle some serious issues. Chicana/o is just now starting to be taken seriously, so being able to created something in a sketchy style, yet having serious research to back up everything is a statement. I think achieved my goal of creating something to educate and change the standard perspective of Chicanca feminism. Of course all projects come with their challenges and flaws, which this one definitely had. One of the biggest challenges was type pairing and illustration style. both of these changed throughout the publication. Throughout the creation of this publication it went through some major changes in each step, but it all led to our end result. I am happy with my end product and I think my hard work did pay off and I have something I can say I produced 100% myself.
Portrait of Editor and Creator, Burdie
