Intern Magazine

We were briefed to come up with an idea for an independent magazine and think about how it would run and what sort of content it would feature.

Concept

We decided to base ours on Beer after Liam and I had a conversation on Sunday about not being able to find Brooklyn Lager on tap in many places in Leeds.

Aesthetic

We decided to call it Brewer based on the idea of making beer and as a reference to my surname. Liam and Jamie did some branding quickly for it and we went for the B in a sticker as a logo with magazine covers that were roughly the colour of different types of beer with white at the top of the page to represent the froth.

Content

Articles about different beers that are hard to find in pub, breweries that make those beers and the pubs that have those beers on tap. This could include interviews.

The adverts would be for alcoholic drinks, gigs and festivals, as this keeps within the cultural realm of the magazine, making the adverts relevant.

We could also use the magazine to give publicity to our own events which, alongside an online presence, could help build a small community around the magazine.

Strategy

We would release three issues a year, in September, December and April to align with when students would be returning to Leeds after Summer, Christmas and Easter.

The magazine would be free as it would be aimed at students, who don't have disposable income, it would be distributed in student pubs such as Dry Dock, The Library, Old Bar, Bierkeller, Brudenell Social Club and Hyde Park Pub.

Money would be made through advertising and merchandising, as we could sell beer mats and glasses with our branding on it. We could also ask some sort of financial donation from the subjects of the articles in return for the exposure.

We could also potentially save money on printing costs by getting it printed at the Eldon pub in return for exposure, as it's currently not a particularly 'studenty' pub. This would also give the magazine the gimmick of being about beer that's printed in a pub.

Real World Problems Workshop

Health & Fitness Topics

• 50 Shades of Grey fitness workout
• Sugary drinks lead to earlier periods in girls
• People spend too much time sitting down
• Drug resistant malaria strain
• This Girl Can Campaign
• Plain packaging helps smokers cut down
• Memory gaps in graduates is a warning sign of a stroke
• Katie Hopkins got fat for 3 months to prove she could lose it

Scientifically Proven Facts About Weight Loss (Forbes Online)

1. Cutting calories by dieting is much more effective for loosing weight than improving the amount of exercise. "If you want to achieve a 300 kcal energy deficit you can run in the park for 3 miles or not eat 2 ounces of potato chips.". Exercising also makes you hungry which makes you eat more anyway.
2. Regular exercise is needed though, as it keeps your metabolism from slowing down, which keeps down the rate at which we gain weight.
3. After gaining and loosing weight it is harder to maintain the same weight than it was to maintain the weight before you gained and lost it, which means that it's much more effective to make sure you don't gain weight than it is to lose it.
4. The idea that some diets are better than other diets for losing weight is a myth, any diet will work as long as it's stuck to.
5. It doesn't matter what you eat when you're on a diet as long as you're counting the calories. Eating 500 calories worth of salad will have the same direct affect on your weight loss as eating 500 calories worth of chocolate.
6. Allowing yourself to get hungry makes you more likely to make poor decisions regarding diet and exercise, and so it is more effective long term to make sure you don't starve yourself.

Katie Hopkins - The fat project

Katie’s daily diet (6,500 calories) 

8am: sausages, bacon, fried egg, hash brown, fried bread; half litre mars milk 

10am: 40g macadamia nuts; croissant 

12pm: half tub Pringles; one can full fat coke 

2pm: Dairy Milk; half litre Mars milk; chicken, bacon and mayo sandwich, white bread 

4pm: half litre Mars milk; Galaxy 

6pm: fish, chips and peas; half pint full fat Lemonade; chocolate cake and double cream 8pm: tea; half tub Pringles; cheese on toast 

10pm: 1 litre Mars milk 

Working it all off: Katie’s daily diet (1,500 calories) 

1 hour run 3 times per week and 20,000 steps per day 

8am: porridge with skimmed milk; pumpkin seeds; banana 

10am: salty popcorn 

1pm: quinoa salad; Milky Way 

4pm: hummus and pitta 

6pm: chicken and salad; jacket potato; yogurt 

8pm: tea; fruit juice

Katie Hopkins Quotes

Too Fat to Work Quotes 

• Lazy and lack ambition.
• Changes a persons first impressions.
• Would someone put you in front of a client?
• Do you look dynamic or disciplined? Highly efficient?
• Sickness issues are a big risk with over weight people. 
• We lost £16.8 billion because of sickness.
• Over weight people know you have to give a good first impression and they choose not to change themselves. 

Can You Be Big and Happy Quotes

• Fat people that are happy are in denial
• No discipline
• Less healthy, more prone to type 2 diabetes.
• Influencing things like 'Plus size range for children' - 3-16. In shops like M&S & BHS, Sets an example to children.

The above clip discusses how overweight people sometimes lack the confidence and motivation to attempt to lose weight, and this is the problem we decided to try and address.

We decided that a solution to this would be a gym that had a minimum weight requirement for memberhip, as this would stop people feeling intimidated by more athletic-looking people, and build confidence to do more exercise in public.

The graphic response for this would be the branding of the gym. We'd use yellow because of how it's bright and has positive connotations. The font would be Times New Roman because of how it's average, which is the weight that we want people to aspire to be, as well as the serifs providing a sense of stability. We'd use it in italic to suggest movement.

Design Thinking Task

Design Thinking is a thought process which emphasises asking the right questions in order to identify the problem. By doing this it gives you a more informed opinion on what the best solution is to the problem, rather than choosing a solution arbitrarily.

The task was to find a way to encourage people in the UK to eat cooked insects, because they're a sustainable food source and incredibly high in protein.

Using the design thinking strategies with identified that no-one in the UK eats them because there's no market for them. There's no stereotypical person that eats them, so we suggested selling them on their novelty, and championing the quirkiness of it, and decided that an ornate Thai-inspired food cart for places such as street food festivals would be a good way to create a market for them, as people who're interested in quirky food would become more aware of the benefits of eating insects.

By coming up with a brand for the cart, it makes it easier for insects to be sold in supermarkets as awareness slowly starts to be raised, because the sort of people that will but them will recognise the brand from the food markets and festivals, and buy them on the strength of the brand. This will then slowly grow eating insects into a more common thing.

The idea for the brand we came up with was Moph, coming from the word Entomophagy, which is the technical word for eating insects. It also plays on the idea that a moth is an insect. The style of the branding had to be clean to rid insects of their dirty connotations, and the m is taken from the Thai alphabet to have some more oriental connotations.

Blogging Workshop

Task 1 - Re-writing a post from OUGD504 in the third person to give it more weight.

During the production of the menu cards, there were quite a lot of vectors that were used that will be used again in the playing card design for consistency within the project.

After some experimentation with the same sort of layout as the recipe cards it became clear that this sort of look was immature and needed to be changed as it looks like a book cover.

Looking back at the websites that sold different packs of cards, the backs of cards are more decorative than anything else. The vectors of the raspberry, tomato, pear, peach, chilli and grapefruit were arranged to create this pattern as a staring point. The honey, maple syrup and bacon were left out because the size of the card lends itself to a 4 x 6 grid, and these 6 toppings have in common that they are food in their natural form, which kept a pretty obvious concept throughout them. Whilst, visually at least, this is an improvement, it no longer looks very pancake-specific, especially without my logotype. Whilst the style of it works with the menu and recipe cards, it wouldn't be fit for it's purpose without them putting it in context.

To get round this I made a vector of a pancake to use in combination with the others. This works excellently on a conceptual level, as it shows that the main thing is pancakes, but everything else can go with them, hinting at what the website is about.

After uploading this to the website, this is the preview that came up. It looks fit for purpose based on the other designs produced for this project and other examples of backs of playing cards.

Task 2 - Re-writing a post from OUGD504 where a design decision has been made on personal preference or aesthetic comparison.

I painted over some of the rough printouts of my leaflet on the watercolour paper to assess how they effect the final product. I bought some watercolour paints yesterday to do a better and more consistent job this time round.

I started off with the green. I found that to get the colour the right sort of saturation that I wanted, the weight of the paint initially made the structural integrity of the paper go out of the window, it was curling everywhere. 

On top of this, I found that thickness of the paint meant that some of the body copy was wiped off. Taking this into account I decided to use considerably thinner paint for the blue experiment.

The paint used for the blue experiment was a lot thinner than the green paint was to avoid taking the ink of the paper. Whilst this was successful, the paint was that watery that you could hardly notice the blue apart from in the fold creases.

As you can see, the paper naturally opened up after it had been painted whereas before the creases stayed pretty firmly shut.

I took a different approach and tried adding splatters of colour in the corner of each page, but I found this clashed pretty badly with the fairly minimal design across the other aspects of the leaflet, so in the end product I'm going to just stick with no colour. I also think that not using the blobs of colour is more contextually appropriate and doesn't communicate the right messgaes, given that the context of this brief is to explain myself, and this sort of randomness doesn't occur in my thought process very often.

Task 3 - Re-writing a post from OUGD504 where a series of small design decision have been made in a way that summarises the accumulation of the decisions.

I looked into previous WWF campaigns, which is something that I didn't feel the need to do before, as regardless of what the previous campaigns have looked like, this project is about what Beth wants. Hopefully I can change the images to be more continuous while Beth still likes them.

Some work as a set because of how the backgrounds have a consistent background style despite having different coloured content. Because of the nature of what I've been doing, the closest thing I've been able to get to a consistent background is the grey bar at the bottom of the posters.

Some have same sort of grungy editing on the images. When you look at the images that I used, it's obvious that I didn't consider this, I edited them all separately to get what I considered to be the "best" result for that photo, and didn't consider how the way you edit things can help the continuity. The lighting is also the same in some of them, which allows for a slight variation in the background itself.

 

 

Task 4 - Re-write your latest post or write your next post using the following guidelines.

• Avoid overly subjective language
• Use sophisticated and professional language
• Don't fill with unnecessary or uncritical details
• Suggest improvements and discuss limitations
• Critical justifications in light of all other options and through experimentation
• Quotes must be referenced
• Explicit yet concise

The blog post that relates to this task is my evaluation for the responsive brief where I did some work for Beth, a creative advertising student.

OUGD503 - D&AD - Pantone - Start of Uncompleted Brief

The Brief 

"Colour is brave. Colour is bold. Colour is real. And it’s, well, colourful. Pantone supports the creative community to deliver, execute, and live that fact. Pantone sets the standard for colour. Nothing else comes close to the diversity or reality of colour of Pantone. And colour is vital. It matters. It’s colour that tells you when to go and when to stop. It’s how you know which tap to turn on, and the reason you know when to be wary of something. 

But it’s not just instructional. Colour is emotional, personal, and evokes our deepest and sincerest feelings. The same colour can mean a myriad different things to a million different people, and everyone has their favourite. In the physical, real world colour is a massive part of everything, from which sports team you follow, the political party you support, to your personal or even national identity – whether the colour’s on your flag or just your favourite mug. 

But because of its ubiquity, people can take colour for granted. And that’s not good

news for creativity.

Reimagine your hometown through a new colour scheme. Think about everything that this identity could include, physical and digital: logo, transport, wayfinding, etc."

My Thoughts

I love reading this brief. In the second paragraph it talks about how our relationships with colour are something that are personal, and how that in the real world that colour has to try and distance itself from these relationships. I love where I live in Sheffield, the area in particular is called Halfway. I've lived there all my life and I don't think I'd choose to live anywhere else, and so this brief looks perfect for me.

Sheffield is known as the green city, which is an excellent starting point given that this brief is about colour and it's connotations. I also notice how the colour green is the one that has the biggest area in a gamut to exploit when it comes to using Pantone colour systems, because so little of the visible spectrum of green is printable in CMYK, which makes this even more relevant.

Further from this, the fact that I live in a place that is actually called Halfway, draws obvious links with colour diagrams such as gamuts, as you can use various points on the gamut to find a colour that's half way between two colours, so I'm expecting to have a very strong conceptual side to this project.

First Steps

Given that I will be living in Leeds while doing this project, I thought it probably a good idea to take some photos of where I live that I can use if needed. Having photo's will also give other people a slight idea of where I live so that I can use them for reference in a crit and things like that.

I tried to take photos that were particularly relevant to the phrase "green city", as that's the start of the concept that I'll be going with. These are the best ones. Clearly some of them aren't as green as they would be in the summer time, but they're still pretty green.

OUGD503 - Study Task 2 - Working With Briefs

Yahoo!

Make Yahoo! the world’s most popular homepage

Objectives

In numbers: To increase the percent of Yahoo! users to set Yahoo! as their homepage. 
In perception: I’m inspired to make Yahoo! the place I start my internet journey every day.

My Response

I started linking together the things that Yahoo wanted to do with their homepage, they wanted to make it fun, aimed at teenagers, and to be not Google. At that age, young people are very much trying to be their own person, have their own interests, and tend to ignore the things they're not interested in, as well as using social media pretty constantly.

This is a mock of what I came up with. In terms of sticking to Yahoo's tradition, all the necessary things are still visible. The background would be a set scene, although the weather in the scene would change to reflect the days forecast. The six sections across the bottom of the screen can be clicked on, the clicked on option moves to the left, and the 5 biggest stories of the day in that topic are displayed in the bar on the left hand side. For example, if shopping was selected, all the options would move across to the right, apart from sport, which would go back to the very left. Using the familiar hashtag shape and the them that Yahoo has of having lots of videos on their homepage, the video in the centre will auto play and the user can scroll up and down to watch a different video in the category. The category chosen is the same as the category in the side panel, this can be changed by either changing the news category in the panel, or by swiping the videos left or right. I also added quick links to the main social media sites, which, once the user has logged into them once, show them how many notifications they have. I changed the Yahoo logo as a concept as I felt that given that it was being used against a background, it needed to be simpler.

I'm pretty happy with what I came up with, as it fits all the requirements and with a little work, I think it could look pretty nice.