Month: November 2019

Open Studio / Branding Workshop

Open Studio / Branding Workshop

 

My group made the decision to come in early to sort out aspects of our magazine we really wanted to explore further as we had a good opportunity to just come in together and discuss ideas; what works and what might not, potential shoots and small ideas to delve into. This was extremely useful in planning new shoots and ideas as we were all really excited to work together on this magazine, the energy and passion of my group really helped me to push myself further too. We discussed locations that relate to our brand which would make for an effective photography location; kebab shops, off licence shops, council estates, bingo places, pubs and basement raves as well as football games came to mind. All perfect for our theme of focusing in on the British working class within Brighton as these are everyday locations that we can transform for our magazine to really highlight the speciality and novelty of how these places mean something different for each person specifically.

This discussion really made us think and refine the specific details we need to consider our audience and why they want to read the magazine, what they want to get out of reading it as well as to think about the types of content they would personally find engaging and why, further from pictures and texts. I feel like we really focused more on our customer further than their age that reflect the sort of things they want in a magazine; we nailed down their locations, shopping habits, clothing brands, political opinions, lifestyle, degree, occupation etc which all reflect their style of magazine they look for. As well as this, I was happy with our meeting as we really progressed slightly further as we planned interview questions for the written content of our essay that I didn’t want to neglect or leave entirely for our copywriter as it should be a group effort to help each other out.

Going from analysing different successful fashion and lifestyle magazines which all have a very cohesive and distinctive aesthetic which are on the current market helped show how each magazine can be very successful yet so different. Such as Aesthetica Magazine; known for its clean cut, sophisticated and enlightened approach to displaying fashion and cultured through its natural and neutral colour palette, newspaper style front cover and not overly styled imagery as well as Luncheon Magazine with its slightly more enthusiastic film cover style imagery which is therefore more conceptual and story like; both with a very different yet clear approach to fashion and lifestyle.

When asked to go across our groups and choose three words to describe our magazine we said these words; raw, gritty, kitsch, social, inclusive, alternative, vintage, independent, political, honest, exciting, natural, informative, bold. We need to keep these words in mind when we practise shoots so we don’t collectively lose the essence of the brand and so we all stay on the same page. The words we narrowed down our magazine to were: raw, gritty and kitsch; meaning that we want to tell real stories, not overly styled imagery with actual interviews of people’s lives while maintaining a fun and light-hearted, slightly kitsch and funny aspect of our theme with fish and chip shop adverts and beer cans designs etc.

Understanding of branding and brand identity; as a whole we definitely refined the brand identity for our magazine as we had a think about it individually and then discussed and refined it a as group; making all of us on the same page which is so essential in creating a magazine as a group effort.

Workshop – Documenting PR Research/Annotation/ Definition of Terms [PR] Magazine/Publication Analysis/ Synopsis/Readership/Audience

Workshop – Documenting PR Research/Annotation/ Definition of Terms [PR] Magazine/Publication Analysis/ Synopsis/Readership/Audience

 

Analysing the specific details within a magazine and especially on the front cover was very useful for me in today’s lesson as we looked into specific elements such as; audience, font, colour, contrast, theme, subtitles, content, photography and imagery etc. I inferred from the front cover of the Dazed magazine I looked at (issue 54) that it seemed like it was aimed more towards men compared to the other magazines on the table with a typical masculine palette, using blues, monochrome shades and silver, also that a male was on the front cover whereas the others has females/beauty shots or slightly oversexualised images which could also be catered towards men; all small aspects, which as a whole adds to the composition of the magazine allowing it to cater to a specific audience compared to if they were to use a different model on the front with different colours etc. These would be very useful in looking further into the elements we would like to use within our own magazine for full effectiveness. 

A further look into the inside of the magazine, picking apart the flat plan of the magazine was functional for my development into thinking about less conventional methods of displaying the contents of our magazine which go further than just having a picture on one page with text on the next; instead there were pages with text going over the images, with the images corresponding to the text; an example of this would be the model in the image looking towards the title text on the other page, or the colour of the text would be taken from an element within the image, also text in different shapes, text coming straight from the models mouth or displayed in a more innovative way to spread the message they want to. I used these tactics within my own work later on when we had to create our own zines as this exercise pushed me to be creative with my magazine layouts.

When coming up with the flat plan of our own magazine, we had to establish the sort of style and personality we wanted for our magazine; a playful yet informative approach is our aim, and using the lesson’s learning aims and activities we suggested the best way to display this would be through pages of just raw images from our shoots with a balanced combination of ages which are edited and playful using text in an engaging way which was much easier to establish once we had done this task.

I found that creating my own zines with magazines, scans, books and scraps we had brought in was both challenging and helpful in pushing myself creatively. Challenging because we had to find images, text, colour etc that represented the ethos of our brand, the general message and personality within magazines that had a completely different style to ours. However, I learnt that this was particularly helpful as it made me look further into ways of changing images and texts to juxtapose them and to create a completely different meaning to them rather than taking an image from a magazine and having it completely the same, I really enjoy doing collages anyway for this reason therefore I found this task really exciting anyway. Drawing on from what our group spoke about and the lecture we just had, I wanted my zine to have pages of full designs and collage along with some double pages with lots of negative space for the balance, as well as trying to stick to the colour palette of black, white and blue, lots of industrial backgrounds as we wanted to do a council estate shoot as a whole to keep my zine reflecting what we wanted from our main magazine Heritage. I got some nice feedback from my magazine as I used a bit of illustration within there which the teachers encouraged I should use more within the magazine potentially if they were more refined and perfected which I will definitely keep in mind. Our group zine that we did was more effective as we spent more time on it, we had discussions about our work and our magazine that brought us all on the same page whereas our own zones were our own interpretation of our magazine, which is still helpful but working on a brief within a group has taught us that we all need to have the same ideas together to create a cohesive outcome as we’re all working on different aspects that are being brought together. My criticism for our zines though were that maybe we took our theme too literally using the British flag on the front because it would be more effective if we found a more conceptual way of displaying the heritage of Britain rather than using the first thing we think of as it’s too literal and obvious. Other groups did amazingly as they used one side upside down and the other side the other way displaying two different sides to their magazine which I thought was very innovative and another had a very clear and set style within their zine which I think we were lacking.

Self-directed Study:

Experiment With Editorial Design; I finished off the zine I made in class and tried to experiment ore with the layout of it; I wanted to really explore the concept of white space/negative space and the effect it can have on the page as I enjoy breathing space within a magazine because if the pages are constantly too busy you forget the individual pages and look at the images more collectively, losing out on a lot of detail and effort.

Research; Finding some images from pinterest, behance etc of exciting magazine layouts is quite inspiring as these artists really prove that the possibilities are endless in terms of creativity and thinking outside of the box. My magazine group have a fairly clear idea of our aesthetic which does differ from a lot of these however, slightly mixing up styles within the magazine but keeping to an overall aesthetic is essential in creating an exciting magazine.