Logo experiments:
To start exploring initial ideas into my zine I wanted to work physically as quickly as possible. In past projects, I feel I've done better when I'm physically making and producing experiments as I feel like its my most productive way of hashing out thoughts and ideas.
I wanted to start off with a simple zine experiment, so I began by quickly putting together an in-the-works-logo that I can change and adapt as the project goes on and I get feedback etc. Settling on the name Glad Print (a synonym of Happy News), I immediately started looking at Blackletter typefaces as these are so synonymous with traditional newspapers such as The Daily Mail, The New York Times etc.
The type face I chose I found on Adobe Fonts called Herb - I really liked it as it created those visual links to traditional newspapers but was on the more subtle side. It has a hand rendered sort of feel to it, like it's been scribbled with a marker quickly. I think that the connection to hand-done feel is appropriate, as I one of my aims is to get people to stop looking at the news so much, which is predominantly online. Having a hand-rendered feel relates to that taking time away from digital.
For development, I'm considering printing out the logo and re-drawing it, making some 'accidental' marks/ mistakes to give it more character and texture. A stamp effect could also work? As it's 'print'. I got this idea as I was researching The Daily Mail. I was trying to find out what typeface that they used for their logo but found out that it's hand drawn.
I added the smiley just for a bit of fun - I wanted a way of simply conveying the message 'this is happy news'. It could be an idea to develop the icon to relate more to news/print - have it reading a paper or wearing reading glasses? For now, I like the simplicity - it get's the message across.
Zine pages:
Sketches:
For my quick zine experiment I wanted to actually utilise some positive news stories right off the bat instead of using Lorem Ipsum. This way, through my experimentation I can develop a bank of positive stories to use in my final outcome, and then gathering positive news isn't a huge daunting research task.
I chose two stories: one about Seville using their many wasted oranges to generate electricity which is a really positive sustainability-focused story, and one about a rescued cat called Truffles that wears glasses to make young children feel better about wearing them, a funny and heart-warming story.
One thing I'm a bit apprehensive about is getting the balance right. I know I'm not technically marked on the content of whatever I produce (I think?) but my aim is for it to be uplifting as well as informative - so I really want to include those nice funny stories, but there has to be some culturally informative ones too. I also have to ensure that the news-stories I use are not just from the UK and the US - as I found out in my questionnaire that people want to see what's happening globally.
One thing I found really fun was quickly illustrating the stories and coming up with headlines (I didn't think of the orange one but I did come up with Move Over, Elton) I think I was feeling inspired by my marker-pen logo idea so I really wanted to get my marker pen out and draw. I've not had a chance to illustrate in any of my other projects but it is something that I do love doing although I never get time to do anymore. I definitely don't want it to take over type and layout as I feel that those are the most important things that I want to focus on as well as form, but I think that it could be a really fun way of incorporating image. From my research I discussed how the graphic images used within the news can cause both mental and physical problems - stress, PTSD etc. so I decided that I didn't want to use any images within my publication. I think that quick, simple, to-the-point illustrations are a good way of working around that.
Posters:
When designing I was trying to come up with some slogan ideas and quickly produced these two posters. I'm actually really happy with them and I prefer them much more to my poster from the poster task. I think that they're better because I just had a bit more time to think about what I want to say - they relate more to this 'brand' that I'm developing. Obviously they don't make sense out of context and would have to go up after a social media page was developed for the product but I think that they work never the less.
Unintentionally, I've been inspired by Harriet Richardson again. After I had made them, I thought back to an interview that she did where she talks about Gestalt - a German word for 'a form or shape that is greater than the sum of it's parts'. I actually blogged this as part of my research:
Harriet does this through word play quite often, but here I've done it through the use of symbols. I think that this is successful, as it does draw the audience in in a Gestalt way. I suppose we would call it A Smile In The Mind. This was quite off the cuff and unintentional, but I'm excited to see if I can keep it up and where it will take me.
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