Work Placement: Outcome 4

After my failed attempt at stapling the magazine, I stitched the upper bit together where I already had the holes, which didn’t look amazing but worked okay. After doing that I tried stapling the bottom bit, I thought even if it would fail, I needed the holes for stitching so nothing to loose here, and all of a sudden it worked! No idea why, maybe the magazine had become flatter in the few hours in between testing or something. Anyways, it held together so I took the thread out of the upper bit and stapled that too.

Work Placement: Outcome 3

For hand in, we decided not to Riso the whole magazine as it wouldn’t be cost effective when only doing three, so basically everything that is meant to be black (except for the collage bit) we printed digitally and the colour bits were Riso’d. A few problems emerged along the way though. Firstly, setting up the InDesign document was kind of a pain because of the way we have designed it. Because we have split it up into sections, every section had to be ale to be divided into 4 so it works printing it in separate booklets that we then put together. 

Work Placement: Outcome 2

Our first try at the Riso with the collage bit went okay but there wasn’t much control over the whole process as we simply plonked the images on there. So we decided to re- do the layout by cutting the images out and sticking them down on a paper that was the right size of the the magazine. Some images also needed a bit of cleaning up and bettering the contrast and blackness because they didn’t come out good enough on the Riso.

Layout process and outcome

We also did some experiments with layering of the cover, duplicating the coloured bit of 7NT which turned out really nice! Makes it more analogue and Riso-y.

Layout outcomes

Also, cutting the paper to the right size before Riso printing is definitely the right way to do it I noticed. It’s extremely difficult to get it right after printing plus the ink smudges everywhere, whereas when you print it on ready cut paper it might be a bit off sometimes but it’s kind of nice and charming and part of the process.

Work Placement: Outcome 1

Another thing to design is the interview pages for the magazine. I literally had no ideas for this and thought I would focus more on the text, deciding point size and look at leading and stuff. I also tried different column width to see how we could work the layout for this, being that the square size could be tricky to design to. 

Work Placement: Development 3

Back to the cover! After some feedback from Tom telling us the cover doesn’t read well and that it feels too composed and digital, I got back to thinking about it and decided to start over with the whole composition. I scanned the ink letters I had and printed them out in different sizes, cut them out and started to compose some designs on a piece of paper in front of me, taking photos as I went along. I tried some organised layouts, some messy, and them started cutting up the letters or gluing them down to a piece of paper and them crumbling them up. I tried to make something happen. But it wasn’t happening. I wanted it to look like the messiness of a cover of Emigre magazine but everything I did just looked boring. I began to realise that the whole process was starting to feel like a huge weight in my brain, it wasn’t fun anymore, I don’t like the name anymore and I don’t like the typeface.

Work Placement: Development 2

Okay so first hand rendered type thing didn’t work like I wanted it to. So I tried another variant. Using bigger tools. So I drew some more type with a biggie 50 pen and also with ink and a bigger brush. As I learned during one of the HotHouse workshops last summer show, ink looks great Riso printed so I thought I should try that out now as well. Again, using Avenir as a base, I made these letters:

Hand rendered type, Lisa 2018

Work Placement: Research 4

Organising everyone’s work was going to be a huge task so we had to be smart in the way we did it. Considering images were going to be different formats, done in different techniques and had to all work together with the colours we have we also thought about different printing techniques, like imitating a cmyk print or restricting ourselves to only two colours to make it more coherent. On one hand, it would look great to do 4 colour prints for the whole magazine throughout but realistically that would be too much work considering it might constitute of 50 pages and each page would need four masters in different colours.