Design process for two-page spread

Start

I roughly laid out where everything was going to go. I placed my images down first to later build the articles around. 

The dominant picture shows the dish simmering in a pot. I wanted to avoid using another image of the finished dish to add variety.  The top smaller image is a full ingredient line up since they are listed for the recipe. The bottom image shows the partially prepared versions of the ackee and saltfish, it served as a transition image between the raw and cooked ingredients.

The yellow section is reserved for the recipe. The red circle was meant to contain the historical context on how the dish came to be. I later scraped it because it threw off the magazine's composition.

I incorporated the text that was originally going to be in red circle into the first article since both pieces relate to the dish's past. 

I still wanted to incorporate red in the yellow section to replace the circle, so the subheadings were put in a red box. It was the wrong shade of red, but it got corrected later.

Finish

I added a subheading to tackle the world issue. To avoid it competing with the main headline and the dominant picture, it was colored brown and had a thinner font. More drop caps were incorporated to give the image more flair. 

Less elements on the second page were red because the dominant image already had some red going on, so the drop cap "T" was the only thing to be colored red.

Shown in my earlier sketch, I overestimated the space needed for captions so I had extra space to work with. The dominant photo was shifted up to be leveled with the headline.

Lastly, the page numbers and byline were added, followed by various text effects to wrap up the spread.