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: 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. 

Work Placement: Development 1

I think my initial kind of go to format for the magazine was A4 (because the Riso prints A3 and that would make it easy to fold down and bind) but after getting the advise that a different format might make people more inclined to pick the magazine up because it looks different, I looked at others variations. We had decided that some form of saddle stitch or stapling technique would suit us best in terms of low cost in production and the relatively speedy way of it so I tried different fold downs from A3 but cropping it after to get a different format than A4. I really liked the long format in the beginning, because I associate a magazine with something being big and the narrow size made it feel bigger even though it was cut. So that was the size we settled on for a while and I made some more cover tests based on that format:

Work Placement: Research 2

Straight after we collected our shared inspiration, I started looking at different ideas for the cover as I thought that would probably take the longest time to design as it kind of sets the tone for the whole magazine. I sketched out some ideas mainly thinking about the placement of the type and mixing capitals with small letters, at the time working with the words “vis comm magazine” as it didn’t have a name yet. Some days after that, we met up in the group and tried to decide on a name for the magazine as that would enable us to think of the cover more, and how we could work with the type. After two hours we came up with “7NT” as it is part of the postcode for the university and doesn’t have too much meaning incorporated in it already so we could make it into whatever we wanted. 

Work Placement: Research 1

One of my work placements will be creating a magazine for the visual communication department at The Cass. The only criteria it has, is that it needs to be Riso printed and Riso printing opens up for being creative with layering work and stuff but it’s also kind of restricting in terms of the colours we can use, the images that will look nice and just the over all production of it. It can’t be too complicated in terms of layering to get multi coloured images because we have to keep in mind the scale of everything and the numbers of masters used in creating only one page. It is going to be a huge project anyways so we have it make it manageable but with less means I think. So first course of action was that we as a group undertaking this placement sat down and found some inspiration of publications and Riso printed material and collected everything in a shared folder to kind of figure out what we all liked.