#project°5

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Black Square with Blue, Ellsworth Kelly, 1970

Tate Modern

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Soho inspired palette for my project5 pdf, I'm crying a bit about it because posted on tumblr it looks quite different than on photoshop, I might print off the pdf just to be sure that my tutor is not blinded.

Browns/earthy colours for the brick buildings

Gold for pub names and various embellishments

Rhodamine Red for the borough's history with the sex industry/neons

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Rewrite the brief identifying the parts of design that interests you

You are asked to design a newspaper.

First, you will need to explore the notion of news and storytelling and how you gather and record the news.

First, you will need to learn how to tell a story in this medium and thus all the nuts and bolts. Identify what is news-worthy and learn the difference between a newspaper article and a magazine article. Get out there and generate your own content (embarrass yourself in interviews, take dubious looking photos).

Next, you need to consider the reader and what position your newspaper takes in the world of media. Exploring the range of broadsheet, tabloid, artists, political, activist and online newspapers to find your position within this field of media.

Next, decide on what the industry looks like and where you want to sit. Discover all the different formats and their implications.

Newspaper design requires a multitude of skills and critical decision-making. Typography, layout/composition, hierarchy of information, image generation and editorial and print production are amongst some of these skills required.

Newspaper design is all about multi-tasking and stressful decision making. Amongst these, type related trouble, exciting layouts, navigation, photography, content generation and management and printing methods.

You can decide upon your main role (chief editor, type designer etc) but also the other minor roles as an independent publisher. You can work individually or decide to form a group to collaborate on producing a larger, more ambitious outcome.

You should choose which part of the process you want to be the most influential in your project, no matter how bizarre for a graphic designer student. Decide a lot of things in a collaboration so your respective terrible decisions are counter-balanced.

Once these aspects have been decided you will need to research and gather the content of your newspaper.

Go forth in the world and over-use the internet and library resources but also generate a lot of genuinely interesting and fun content.

Does your paper feature current news (good & bad) or does it have a certain angle to it (crime, history, political etc), is it local, national or international news?

Choose a subject that you would not be bored of after six weeks of intense research and discussing. Find a subject you like and somehow find news related to it.

This project has 2 x design requirements:

Outcome 01.

1. Generate a name & identity and design your newspaper’s masthead

2. Decide on the typefaces, layout, language, imagery, pace and tone to define the overall aesthetic design of your newspaper

3. Gather your content

4. Design a whole edition and produce at least 5 + copies of your completed newspaper

  Outcome 02.

An edited research document that clearly shows your individual research, development and reflection for this project.

This can be any format but should reflect the approach you have taken throughout the project and be discussed with your tutors.

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http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/11/newspaper-website-design-trends-and-examples/#more-1791

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Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing

(via the design observer)

WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was first published in 1976 by Leonard Koren. Thirty-four influential issues were published before the magazine closed in 1981. The following is an excerpt from a new memoir: Making WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing by Leonard Koren; from Imperfect Publishing (2012), printed with permission of the author.

Here's some choice paragraphs that really inspired me in this excerpt.

Though I had no skills in writing, editing, designing, art direction, advertising sales, publishing, or business generally, I didn’t consider this an impediment. I would learn as I went along. Besides, I had a lifetime of opinions about what made magazines irresistible. For instance, I loved the emphatic dogmatism of Vogue. “This season it’s RED!” “Baggy is OUT!" ”GRAY is the new BLACK!” Of course, it was sheer bluster. But it perfectly exemplified a certain manufactured hauteur that was vital to making the “magazine-reality” illusion work, at least in the realm of fashion.

Oh well, so that's some of the main worries out of the way isn't? It's always been my opinion that not knowing anything about a subject might sometimes be a good thing : it's a fresh perspective, a new angle. Obviously that's probably the one and only positive aspect of ignorance, but levelled with enthusiastic learning, humility and luck it could be an asset. Also needed : energy and a flexible mind. So yeah, you put all these conditions together and it's easier said then done, but the point is : it's not impossible to make your ignorance work for you.

On balance, there was enough encouragement to fuel my confidence for a second issue. This time the publishing routine was the same except now there were more pages, and thicker, denser paper. There were also more expenses, so I charged more for advertising to compensate. By issue three, still working under the influence of kind words and peer support, I was on the verge of producing a “real” magazine: a hefty thirty-six pages, on coated stock, with an appealing cover image. 

Some vague guidelines maybe, or at least something against which I can judge my ambitions.

I'll close on this paragraph that I found excellent motivation : communicate well/look good, a noble goal with beautiful means.

But now, elements like font style, line and character spacing, etc., no longer seemed like inconsequential details. They were the means, the constituents of a graphic grammar and connective tissue, necessary for establishing visual relationships between words and pictures. Much of a magazine’s synergistic dynamism, I realized, was precisely due to the kind of page “decoration” I had once eschewed. If I had more command over this graphic language, I could make a better magazine.

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I am deeply in love with our new project. I made into my desktop background.

Even though I'm on holidays in a dream (warm!) location, I spent an unreasonable amount of time researching the inception of my future labour and sending enthusiastic facebook messages. Everything is very exciting and I want to do a lot with it. Obviously this is how I almost always feel about new projects but I don't think putting an end to my enthusiasm for beginnings will make me any more efficient on deadlines so I allow myself to gleefully read and scribble away. This is gonna be good!