MY OBSESSIONS
RESEARCH
These are some of the magazines and newspapers I looked at during my research.
Name: Vogue (British)
Type: Fashion:
Price: £4.50
Frequency: Monthly
Audience: People interested in Fashion, Women, Middle-Upper class
Competitors: Cosmopolitan, In Style, other fashion magazines
Style: Photography based, formal,
Content: Photographs, fashion news, reviews,
Cover Image: Red colour scheme, woman posing seductively, for some reason covering up the G in Vogue whilst placed behind all other letters; bold, orange and white text.
Notes: Contents page is 26 pages in!!!
Name: Creative Review
Type: Arts magazine
Price: 5.90 (cheaper with subscription)
Audience: Artists, students, designers
Frequency: Monthly
Competitors: Other art/design/photography magazines
Style: Creative,
Content: Reviews, news, business cards, artist profiles, articles about artists/designers
Cover Image: A paragraph containing pictograms, describing and showing what is inside
Name: Radio Times
Type: TV guide
Price: £1.20
Audience: Working-Middle class
Frequency: Weekly
Competitors: Various TV guides
Style: Informal, grid structured, continuous
Content: TV guide, TV/media based news, reviews, interviews
Cover Image: Celebrities, Sir Paul McCartney and James Cordon
Name: Doctor Who Magazine
Type: TV spin-off magazine
Price: £4.50
Audience: Sci-Fi fans (like me), working-middle class
Frequency: Monthly
Competitors: Other Sci-Fi magazines - such as Star Wars - and Doctor Who Adventures (a version for kids)
Style: Grid Structured, fairly informal, continuous
Content: News, reviews, comic strip, opinions, mail forum
Cover Image: A character from the show, a Dalek
Name: I
Type: Newspaper
Price: 20p
Audience: Working-Middle Class
Frequency: Daily
Competitors: All newspapers (The Times, The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Sun, etc.)
Style: Grid structured, newspaper-like
Content: News, reviews, TV guide, business news, sports
Cover Image: Political, Ed Miliband
INTERVIEW WITH ADAM GUY
Tuesday 8th March
10:30am
MY FIRST DRAFT
OCD
I did some research on OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) both online and in Waterstones (easier than the library).
Sites
http://www.ocduk.org/
http://www.ocdonline.com/defineocd.php
http://www.uncommonforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=60837 <-- this one was quite interesting as a guy was asking about the number 3 in OCD. I would have spoken to him but it wouldn't let me post anything.
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100204082601AAv98pX
Books
OCD For Dummies
Free From OCD
NUMBER ILLUSION
This is a bit like how I hear odd numbers.
(Click on it to enlarge, it makes it clearer)
DIAGRAMS
I looked at a few diagrams of graphic equalisers. Graphic equalisers edit sound to suit the users needs and produce the best sound. The sound goes in, the frequency, pitch, tone etc are measured and altered in whichever way the user chooses, then outputted in the edited format.
GRAPHIC EQUALISERS
THE EAR
DESIGN INFLUENCE
I wanted to use something like these information graphics from the TV series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy from the 80s. The graphics were portrayed as articles from the Hitchhiker's Guide, a computerised book. The images were created by Pearce Studios, mainly by a man called Rod Lord. He drew the images onto acetate in black ink, sent it to a dark room to be turned to a negative, then placed them on a light box and used various coloured sheets of acetate to produce the light images shown below. I was fascinated when I learnt how he did this, even more so because he had to do this for EVERY frame, which amounts to hundreds of sheets of acetate. He must have been a very patient man. The first example shown below is of a Babel Fish, which is a fish that feeds of brainwaves and excretes sound waves which enables the person to hear any language translated. I figured this could work similar if the sound waves I hear are different for odd numbers which are being translated wrong by my brain. This is what reminded me of the graphics.
TITLE
These are some of the possible title names I came up with. The final one was chosen as a play on words from the song 3 is the Magic Number. Of course, for me, 3 is not a magic number as it is odd, although it does have significance in my life, hence whey I used this title.
In the background you can see parts of a drawing I did for the ear when I was originally going to hand draw the ear diagram and scan it in, but this idea changed so I decided not to.
TAKE 1
This was my original idea - which I still like - but it looks too simple and not really good enough. The speaker symbol doesn't really NEED to be there. The columns were not all equally spaced apart, and ended up all on even numbers (on a centimetres scale), whereas my original idea was to have one on an odd number apart from the others in red.
TAKE 2
The image looks too child-like and not really the effect I was after.
FINAL ARTICLE DESIGN
Evaluation
The article itself is written as clearly as I could explain it, with correct grammar and writing techniques. The feedback from peers and tutors tells me it is interesting, easy to read, easy to understand.
The design is linked to the content of the article. The text is written vertically to represent the sound waves on a graphic equaliser. The scale measures the lines in centimetres/decibels. The lines that fall within the odd numbers on the scale are in red to indicate they are wrong. The diagram is of a graphic equaliser circuit, where sound is edited. Originally this diagram had another image of the inner ear with it, and it was all in coloured vector images, but this image suits better
It is appropriate for FEED. I have set it out with negative space, and moved slightly away from conventional presentation styles by having vertical text with irregular line lengths. I originally used Din as the font, but I do not have this on my home computer so it has automatically been changed back to Arial (have I have had Din I would use it).
I enjoyed Yellow Week and learnt valuable skills in Journalism. I learnt about style guides and adhering to a group's design, writing interesting first and last sentences, working in a group and on my own, using correct grammar in articles and how to lay out a good spread. I think the group wasn't the best organised as one member hadn't written anything by Wednesday and two weren't there on Wednesday or Thursday.
HERE IS A LINK TO THE FINISHED ARTICLE
http://group9feedmagazine.blogspot.com/
May I also apologise for the layout of this page. It is very temperamental and keeps adding large gaps in between the images. Sorry.
