Author: Eilidh Mcgee

molly interview

For the identity part of our magazine, I interviewed molly taylor. A student and graphics designer based in brighton. It was really exciting doing my first in person interview with a group of people to help me. I worked along side, the visual promoter to ensure that we captured words and videos to feature in the magazine. Where I had written a few questions and stuck to them, I wished maybe I thought about the questions and how they actually would sound over audio but apart from that I was very happy with the first proper interview, I learned so much from this interview from how people see their own identity to working in a crew to ensure that the interview ran smoothly.

Mini magazine collage

In this workshop, we experimented with collaging and making a mini magazine, to play around and experiment with how we might want our magazine to look like. When creating mine, I had the brief idea of sticking to our futuristic theme through using images of transport, computers and sticking to a dystopian colour palate. For the main cover, I placed a picture of a woman who was in colour and wore a tin like dress, complimenting her with a black and white background which looked very space like- much like she was on another planet. On the next page, I paired a car with writing just because I thought the use of motion was meaningful. I placed a random quote upside down, experimenting with different ways to show quotes. And lastly, at the end of the mini magazine, I wanted to end it with an enigma by adding a random year just so people would know when the next and upcoming realise would be.

I enjoyed playing around with collaging as i believed it made us think in what direction we wanted to go with the aesthetic for the magazine.

micro dosing photoshoot

for this photoshoot, dvoid magazine created imagery based off my main mental health article where i discuss micro dosing mushrooms. i was very excited to come to this photoshoot as it was almost like my words had come to life. i contributed to props in this photoshoot by bringing real and non toxic mushrooms to the studio to help achieve a more realistic look to the photographs. with my role, i was assisting behind the scenes and casually giving out a few ideas to help the photographs. i believe that we all worked together to create some really interesting photographs.

foraging walk. research.

Despite my primary research into foraging via interviewing Emma Collins, I carried out further research into the world of foraging. After finding a WhatsApp group full of brighton foragers, i asked them what was the best spot in brighton for foraging, i was told stanmer park had some of the best foraging finds in brighton. So after finding out that information on a cold november morning, me and my friends grabbed our snacks for a picnic, pre downloaded our mushroom identify app and caught the next bus towards stanmer park.

As we ventured into the deep forests of stanmer park, we looked around and could not identify or scout out any mushrooms or treasures, except from the beautiful surroundings of the forest. But as we continued to stroll through the woods, we started to spot more and more mushrooms, once we finally spotted one, our eyes were open to more and more patches of mushrooms dotted around the woodland. Our app helped us identify the mushrooms, letting us know if it was poisonous or not, the non-poisonous ones I picked and placed into a bag to bring to our microdosing photoshoot as a prop.

My overall first experience of foraging was such a joy. It was nice to take a break from relaying on my phone to keep me entertained. Not only did this trip help me bond more with nature but it also helped me bound more with my friends as we shared the same joy for discovering the hidden beauties of nature.

In relation to my editorial writing, this foraging trip really inspired me to think more creatively in how to express a love for foraging and nature whilst thinking about the thoughts of how foraging could change in the future. Nature is something so precious that i really hope does not get distracted by all the technology in the world.

magazine update

through many discussions surrounding around futurism and our magazine, we all agreed that our original technology and cyber idea was mainstream and overly done before. as a magazine we believed that we could cross boundaries and try coming up or following an aesthetic that is barely even touched upon within the futurism theme. we mixed surrealism with realism, showing natural living within a surrealist way. using natural tones and themes to convey a theme so unfamiliar and sci-fi based. we wanted to remove the technology and cyber from the future and explore themes that would impact on the future.

 

Ideas

when thinking about who our magazines customers audience is as a group we came up with many different ideas. Thinking about our customer audience helped generate more ideas into our head into how we wanted our magazine to look like for our ideal customer audience. Our ideal customer audience was male/female/non-binary, we don’t believe that our magazine will be more appealing to one certain gender. However we decided to keep our customer audience based in 18-20ish, gen z’s just so we could make the future seem a bit more appealing to them. We pictured a alternative/quirky person, who’s not afraid to play around with their style and be different. They enjoy going to raves and researching more about the meta verse.

 

YEAR 2. Editorial Brief

Today we were introduced to the first brief of the year. The Editorial Brief is a projected based on creating a magazine in a fast-paced and team environment. In lesson, we were set into small teams and groups and assigned different roles within the team. Our team goal was to produce a successful magazine in order to create a professional magazine. My assigned role within the team was the Editorial Writer. As an Editorial Writer, I am responsible for researching and creating written pieces with accompanying visuals for paper and online platforms. My aim and goal is to explore how tone is created in writing and journalistic context.

Within our groups, the first thing that we discussed was different themes and ideas that our magazine could be based on. The first thing that we all were interested in was the theme of futurism and technology. We created a mind map with all possible ideas and inspiration. Such as media, street fashion, plastic surgery and trend predictions. Our inspiration being based on TV show black mirror. As the theme is quite a big theme we are yet to come decide on different themes for the magazine to feature but I believe the more we speak and meet up as a group, the more defined our idea will be. To help our ideas flow and decide on aesthetics, we created a group pinterest, this was very helpful for us as it visually allowed us to see if people were on the same page.

Bellow was our mind map of ideas.

 

EVALUATION

Looking back on my Visual promotion module there were many things that I had learnt, the whole module was completely new to me, despite briefly looking into trends in college. It was so interesting to go into depth into why trends are important and how to create sub-brands from pre existing brands.

I enjoyed learning about how trends are created and founded, researching into how to create and promote a brand, learning all the different aspects on how to make a brand successful. The challenges in which I came across through out the module included deciding on an aesthetic, visually thinking about how to promote a brand to a certain audience and creating an event for the audience. I also found that narrowing down ideas to be difficult at times.

However, I dealt with the challenges by carefully looking at inspiration that would inspire my journey into visual promotion. producing SWOT analysis was very helpful at times, as it helped me identify the weakness and strengths of not only my brand but other brands too, helping my sub-brand get stronger than the competitors.

However, I have overall enjoyed this module and I am pleased with my final outcome. This has changed the way the I think about how brands are created and produced, I did not realise the effort that a brand had to go through to create a confident brand. I also found making my own macro boards with ss23 enjoyable as i was creating my own images to add to these macro trend boards.

If I could do this project again, I would’ve like to spend more time looking at how a brand is produced. I had difficult time creating a pop up shop, however with more time and inspiration, I believe I could create a strong brand.

TIK TOK

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(click on link to view tik tok)

In this workshop, I experimented with creating a storyboard in order to produce an item of clothing on instagram. Rather than creating a tik tok for my brand, I focused on how to create one. This workshop was interesting as It gave me a good overall feel on how to produce a video for promoting my garments in the sub-brand. I firstly created a storyboard of me unpacking my jacket. Once the storyboard was created, I began to create the tik-tok. using many different clips put together. after recording I added font and placed it in black and white, to create more tone and a clearer aesthetic to the video. the final results were interesting to watch, however I believe that the video could’ve been more crisper and smoother. I would potentially like to use this for my sub-brand.

Macro trends and WGSN

WGSN is a trend forecasting company founded in west london in 1998 by two brothers, Julian and Marc Worth. The company is used to predict and create trends for up and coming seasonal trends. When taking a brief look at the SS23 trends on the website, I found many trends for the summer however one trend stood out to me, SOFT ACCESSORIES a trend that i believe is in relation to my sub-brand and my theme. The trend predicts that soft accessories will be used in 2023 in summer. using accessories like a sustainable scarf, a baseball cap and a bucket hat will be introduced in womens wear. It is said that this will be the season to experiment with different colours and accessories. I hope to represent this macro in my macro trend board.