I'm generally inclined against borders — they cramp a page. I think this layout benefits in particular from starkness

Two more pictures, so there's one for each crow, would be nice, yeah. The fact that it's three pages really helps that, too.

Indentation, like in Vincent's text, is working against you on short lines. “The Dissenter's statement is as follows” is floating around in space. I'd do something else to differentiate it. It's a header, after all.

I really, really like the columns, with one side explaining while the other illustrates. I just figured that out, though, and I think this is why: the columns change size and the right one seems subordinate to the left one. The righthand looks like a sidebar, but it's not — it's real content, not filler and not something you can come back and read later. You've got a two-dimensional page here, rather than just a wrapped line, but it's not clear what order to read it in.

So I'd suggest figuring out how to make the page so you can read one with the other expanding.

I have an aesthetic issue with the columns, too: they don't seem to have any real proportion to each other. They change size from one page to the next, and the sizes seem guided by page-scale concerns, rather than document-scale.

I wholly approve of the font. It seems to be a relative of Centaur. What is it?

This is just based on impressions, rather than any actual knowledge of what I'm doing, but I find the placement of the pictures a little jarring.  On the first page it looks like it's about to crash into the text box for the example text, and on the third page it's floating in the middle of nowhere.

I think the second page is the most successful in terms of rules text to example text.

I notice that on the second page the rules text is aligned with the center of the relevant example text, but on the third page, it's aligned with the top of the example text.  On the first page, there doesn't seem to be a consitant relationship.  Maybe keeping it consitant throughout will help deliniate the relationship between the two?

I'd think about moving the text of your first example box back into the main body.  Your first paragraph now begins with “The crows…” and I'm thinking “what crows?” and I don't know until I read the callout text on the right, which I'd normally read second.

There seems to be an awful lot of white space around the edges. was this on purpose?

I like the muted blue hues, by the way.

I had reservations about the font. It felt too fiddly and ornate for body text. I suspected I would be suffering from eyestrain after a few pages.  But printing it out and reading off paper it worked fine.

The shading and the border, especially the border, make the example play appear to be a stream of unrelated sidebars instead of a single coherent story.  The example play stands strong on its own, and it was frustrating to have it cut up this way.

The example play stands so very strongly that I wanted to read it as straight fiction of three crows crafting a story between themselves.  The example play mixes the spoken story with mechanics, with no formatting to distinguish between the two. The end result feels like I'm reading a story mostly composed of dialogue into which random bits of nonsensical action and numbers have been added.  Setting the mechanics off by font, size, indentation, or something might help.

If you're considering a watermark effect, have you considered using the watermark itself to mark the two columns as being different content?  To toss out one idea: Get a simple silhouette of the upper body of a crow, make it big enough to mostly cover one of the two columns, bleeding off at least most of the left and right sides, probably the bottom as well.  Crop it at the center between the two columns.

Is there a reason you condensed the title text instead of working with line breaks in the intro copy?

Why is the intro copy where it is, vertically?

Why is the last picture the size it is?

Are these to be printed on Tabloid with something on the back cover? If so, what's going on the back cover? If not, why do the page numbers alternate sides? Oh, and if you're going to have it be a fold-over, maybe it should have a front cover instead, which would mean the page numbers would be on opposite sides.

The falling feather and other elements are balanced very, very nicely. Maybe you can reuse one, reduced, as an ornament at the very end?

The title seems sort of “surprised” to me, rather than hanging. It's certainly not the case that there's never a reason to distort a glyph, but it's not a great idea — the proportions of the font that are designed into it all disintegrate.

That intro phase is actually fairly important to understanding the document, I have it centered on the title and impinging into it a bit.

When you look at a rectangle, you don't see its center. You see its corners, then you see its edges. As a result, when you center something, you're getting as far as you can from associating it with the thing you're centering it with.

The last picture has the size it does because it's as big as it can be and still give the rest of that page room to breathe.

Did you try cropping it to make it shorter so it can match the width of the columns? Right now it's floating in the center of the page, unrelated to the margins and column edges.

If it's intended to be viewed onscreen or printed out, I'd guess that few people will print front-back, which means the “2″ will be on the left side of the page and the “3″ will be on the right. Have you printed it out and stapled it to see how it flows?

The last ornament would go at the end of the copy. There are lots of ways to do it. Check out any magazine to see what they've got at the end of each article.

(Note how the designer finishes with an ornament/dingbat. Also not, apropos the above discussion about centering, that the last two lines are centered precisely so there's a pause between them, deliberately preventing flow. It's clever!)

(This is more or less what I was thinking about.)

Is there a reason the bottom two boxes on page two aren't aligned at the bottom?

I'm still not sure about the first paragraph being pulled out like that.  It reads to me like a paragraph break, but a paragraph break doesn't make sense there, so I get confused.  If it were your text, I'd suggest re-writing to get a better flow.

Why are the paragraph breaks so much bigger on the second page?

Have you tried aligning the picture and the text box at the bottom of page one?

The second thing I was talking about was the seperation of the content of the first callout box at the top of the first page from the content of the first paragraph.  When I'm reading, I interpret the jump from the callout box to the first paragraph as a paragraph break,  I expect them to be seperate ideas, or a jump in perspective.  But they're not.  The callout text flows straight into the first paragraph.  With that first text cut off, the opening paragraph reads strangely to me.