Intro:
You will find below the things I will share with you based on my findings during my search of magazines in regards to designing my graphic design portfolio.
When you create a graphic design portfolio that has impact, you do not just pull out of thin air what you think looks good. Instead, you would need to do your homework and see what is currently happening in your area of focus.
For my current project, I chose to explore the fast-paced, high stakes world of sports media. My objective is to discover contemporary design trends in sports magazines and how best to incorporate these into my portfolio.
For the past several days, I have researched all aspects of designing a magazine from current typographical choices to traditional industry icon layouts. Below, you will find out what I learned, how this learning has influenced my project, and where I expect to go in the future.
Research/impact:
The concentration of my research was on two key areas: finding general design trends for the years 2024 through 2025 and completing a deep dive into two of the major competitors within the industry, Making a case for the success of Sports Illustrated (a legacy print publication) and the success of The Athletic (a current digital authority).
General Sports Design Trends for 2024-2025
The foundational concept of all current sports graphics is energy. Recent analyses completed by various industry sources reveal the following major trends that continue to be dominant within the industry:
Bold Fonts: The industry is seeing flats with huge or large-sized fonts that are extremely high in contrast, along with font styles that are frequently stretched or compressed and made to look as large as possible on the screen or page. The importance of this is that it is a practical solution to increasing readability on both digital displays and at a distance from the stadium (Score Vision Creators, 2025).
Gritty Textures: Graphic designers are starting to layer textures that are less visible (such as grit, halftone effects, or worn-out paper) behind photos of athletes in order to convey an authentic game day experience.
Electric Gradients and Color Overlays: Bright neon colors and electric gradients can now be seen SOP and replacing traditional, muted colors (the typical color palette of the past).
Highlighting Isolated Moments: Athletes' actions may also be depicted in an isolated manner through the use of sharp lines, bold shadows or strokes around the action captured to highlight dynamic athletic action.
These elements combine to create a Bold Minimalist or sometimes Maximalist Illustration style, ensuring that even standard information feels dynamic (Piktochart, 2025).
Ex 1: The Athletic
I’m interested in learning how The Athletic uses design advantageously throughout their writers' work. The writers do not often have a conventional "magazine format." The answer may be found in how they utilize digital infrastructure.
Their design ethos is entirely about supporting depth and authority. The Athletic is a subscription-based model that prioritizes in-depth journalism. The design supports this by being exceedingly clean. There is no clutter. You won’t find aggressive pop-up ads or chaotic sidebars.
This minimalism forces the reader to focus on the writer’s words, making the content feel valuable and trustworthy.
The effectiveness lies in their use of hierarchy. Key headlines are bold and clear, entry points like drop caps are used to guide the reader into long blocks of copy, and line lengths are optimized (usually 50-70 characters) to ensure the reader’s eye doesn’t tire (Yes I’m a Designer).
Their design strategy also includes integrating podcast recordings, tweets, and real headlines directly into the visual story (Ways & Means, 2025).
The Takeaway for My Portfolio: Design can be powerful by being invisible. If I choose a long-form article piece, my design must serve the text.
Ex 2: Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated writers utilize the incredible power of the moment. On the other hand, while not usually referred to in this fashion, The Athletic has an analytical approach. SI, on the other hand, has always focused on "immortalizing the moment" (Oreate AI Blog, 2026).
By the time an SI writer's feature article has made it to your hands, they have gained valuable capital. The iconic cover design of a Sports Illustrated magazine issue establishes an instant emotional connection to the article.
The cover of SI showcases dynamic images that capture action and emotion through pictures of athletes at the peak of their careers along with powerful headlines and images that draw the viewer's attention.
I deconstructed an iconic SI cover featuring Sidney Crosby to analyze the cover design. The SI cover design intentionally uses a limited color palette (white/red/black) with custom-designed fonts (not commercially available; like they were designed for SI), to illustrate a prominent subject, Sidney Crosby, on its cover.
SI uses images and text to create a cohesive narrative (e.g., Canada's opportunity to win the Olympics) and maintain a page turner's instant impact (Scribd).
The Takeaway for My Portfolio: If I am designing a magazine cover or feature spread, I will use a "hero image" that can tell the story on its own and be supported by minimal typography but powerful typography.
Analysis/Impact:
This research has been of great assistance to me. It helped make me aware that I initially viewed my magazine portfolio project as a generic template, and my intention was to create a "sporty" look to everything in my "sports magazine".
So, moving forward, the change I am making is to create two separate projects (two pieces) instead of one generic magazine layout (one piece).
Piece A: The Analytical Spread (following The Athletic model). This piece will be designed as a long article, with extensive data/visualization. It will be designed in a very clean way, with very well-designed, easy to read typefaces using few color(s), and allowing both the data and copy to be the focus.
Piece B: The Spectacle Cover/Spread (following the Sports Illustrated model). This piece will have a strong/spectacular cover and the beginning portion of a feature article. It will be designed with strong color overlays, harsh surface textures and very large/dominant typography to create an immediate "WOW" for the viewer.
I'm sure I'm going in the right direction now and have established a stronger vocabulary for my design decisions (such as, "The condense bold typeface I will use is a part of the 2025 wave of typefaces that are best for stadium-style readability").
Reflection:
Now that I have my strategy, the road ahead is clear:
Content Gathering: Piece A requires either an existent or original story about sports that is both interesting and rich in data. That ideal story must have a great photo that is the most appealing out of all images associated with that story for Piece B.
Aesthetic Application: To achieve those goals, I will work on the same specific techniques described throughout the trend research. In addition, I will watch some of those video tutorials about creating textured elements in InDesign, as well as experimenting with using gradient maps for electric colors or textures in Photoshop.
Next, I will focus my research on creating visualizations using sports related data so I can generate tables containing statistics that convey dynamism using examples from the graphic design examples shown in the 2025 examples.
This research has been the catalyst I needed to move from concept to creation. It’s time to stop scouting and start playing.
What comes next?
Next, I am going to create my project proposal and showcase my base plan for my portfolio, then start the planning process.
Sources:
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