Magnetic tape/music zine evaluation

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Magnetic Tape was a labour of love and a final piece that I actually really enjoy. The real problem witht his brief was the fact that it's the first one I started and I spent far too long on it, although I'm glad of some of the revisions I made to it. Everything seemed to go wrong; screen-printing failed several times, the ink was inconsistent on the digital prints that I made (although I ended up using and photo-shopping these ones). I wanted to be able to produce a bunch of copies to actually distribute, but unfortunately this became difficult when the screens didn't seem to register properly, effectively upping the cost.

I think that the range of products, 4 issues and a blog is probably a reasonable amount, but on reflection I could have perhaps thought of a few more directions to take it in.

magnetic tape blog

Kevin from topshelf suggested a blog a while ago. I got round to designing it at long last. It's all black and white like the issues and uses helvetica (arial if viewer doesn't have helvetica) as body copy like the issues do, so they tie together quite nicely.

I had to change the header fomr an older design that I had to this one keeping with the style of the zine:

Attempt at screen-printing zine, what to do next

OK, so I attempted to screen print my zine but it was rubbish! the black was more consistent, but I don't even like that and the type came out illegible, unfortunately someone took it upon themselves to bin/remove the stuff before I had time to photograph it, so I guess now what I'm going to have to do is stick with what I've got and photoshop them. Propose that the stock is similar, but not the same (inkjet friendly instead) and not actually mass produce this zine, think about doing that over summer if I get time.

Anyway, here are photos I took of all of the physical products photoshopped, they look ok and these are what I'll use for my boards. I wish I could get more consistent colour quality. I need to work with a photographer to shoot my stuff in the future!

First issue:

Future issues

proposed spreads

Final Crit yesterday

OK so we had our final crit, here are a few photographs of the work I presented and the forms of feedback I got back.
Things I couldn't present: Brand guidelines book, on blog, Fashion yearbook (full colour proof was with Paul at this time) and the black and white spreads didn't do it justice so I referred them to blog.

Feedback I got was generally very positive, the only problems really, were sorting out the blog coherency in regards to the design context brief and making sure that certain things that have occurred are recored properly (I have some gaps of information that I haven't put up yet.) These are things i'm aware of, and I'm going to break OUGD303 DC into two tags; ougd303dc and ougd303dc BOOK, this will separate general research from when I'm starting to bring it all together and put it into my book.

Other then that, I feel confident that I'm moving towards the end of all of my briefs and it's just a case of getting everything printed and photographed ready for putting on boards. As well as getting the context book ready so I can begin printing on a few different paper stocks by the end of the week/beginning of next week.

crit

Today's crit:

I presented work from Magnetic Tape ('Music Zine'), The Kubrick Brief and the Les Morts brief. I wanted to get some advice on what I should do to bind the zine (staple, sew etc.) also, how to expand the kubrick brief, plus if I needed to tweak what was going on with it. Finally, the Les Morts stuff, I had a few proposed business card and compliments slip layouts and I wanted to know which one people thought was working most effectively.

The feedback I got from these questions was alright; consensus was to either bind with black thread or black staples, I'm inclined to go with black thread to avoid spending any more money, because this brief was supposed to be to produce as cheaply as possible. No one commented on the print problems with it, so perhaps I've built this up in my head a bit(?) I think a rough and ready DIY zine perhaps lends it's self to this.

The Les Morts stuff; Generally, people thought the layout where the details were aligned right and with compliments was aligned left was working most effectively. With the business card, the details aligned centrally (the one I prefer, and transposed directly to the compliments slip, got the most approval.) In terms of design for the fronts of these things (with the images) the images were a bit dark on the print and the quality of the laser print was poor, so it wasn't really a just representation. However, the suggested just having the words and removing the coffin, which I'm inclined to agree with. I may use the coffin for the branding guide and 'look-book' still though, because it's a larger space to work with and won't feel like I'm cramming everything in.

With the Kubrick stuff, it went down well. Joe who was supervising gave me some tips to improve it, the times on the posters aren't working well (see bottom photograph) they need to be a different weight and grided in a seperate column, and the space between one column of dates and the next needs to be bigger otherwise the eye is drawn from one to the other in a way that makes it less readable. Other than that though he was very positive about them. The books he say need some more info on the back to make them more believable as real book covers, publishing details etc.

In terms of general feedback, my blog seems fairly straightforward, and relatively up to date, I just need to keep on top of it and keep producing work apparently. I think I've been a bit slack of late and need to add some context research that I've been doing but haven't got round to yet.

Test print pastel stocks

I found these pastel stocks that are similar to sugar paper, but a weightier stock and a higher quality. They come in various different pastel shades, which allows me to pick 4 and use one colour for each quarterly issue, which lets them work as a set but have an individual presence for each issue. It also keeps the cost down very low, which is what I need if I am to be producing a few copies of these things.

The problem with it was that it didn't respond to inkjet ink so well. however, I am confident that it will respond to screen-printing a lot better. Here are some photographs of the results and the problems with the finishing quality to it. Despite these problems, I have to say I really like the way it looks and I'm very proud of it as a piece.

Sticker designs

Here is a quick series of designs for a sticker to stick on the black tissue paper that the magazine will be wrapped in. The difficulty is going to be getting a close match of colours for these stickers and the paper. I think stylistically, they fit very well with the zine it's self.

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Poster to go with zine

So I thought it would be nice to have a little poster to go with the zine using a similar style as the zine; simple typographic communication. I thought about what my audience would want, and although my zine deals exclusively with DIY bands it doesn't demonstrate a lot of DIY ethics vocally, so I thought I'd generate some kind of rallying slogans that people can get into or at least put on their walls. So here is my development for that;

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And here are the final selected posters: One for each issue. I decided not to include the magnetic tape logo because full on branding something is not a very DIY way of doing things, which is why the 'branding' looks so minimal in the first place.

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future magnetic tape spreads.

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Here are some examples of how the spreads would change n future issues. I'm going to print these out onto different coloured papers to propose as further design directions. As you can see, the different kinds of pages have a similar grid and spec. The covers are the same except for the number change, I believe this makes it more enigmatic.

Resolving Magnetic Tape

So, This magnetic Tape brief has been hanging around forever, and I'm getting sick of it. I've made some final changes to the direction and then that's it done.

Firstly, after some research, I've decided to scrap the A0 poster idea, owing to the fact that I can't find any paper stocks apart from day-glo, which I'm positive will look pretty grotesque. Instead, it is likely that I will use sheets of A3 laser printer paper (100-130gsm) in pastel tones, using a different pastel colour for each quarter's issue, providing an obvious visual clue as to how to break them up.

I've started to really grow to dislike a lot of the script font. It might seem appropriate but it's also over used. I want to tone it down in favour of the more blocky, bold and stripped down 'bebas' font. This extends to the cover. I feel like I've been overcomplicating things and I just need to communicate as simply as possible with typography. For this reason I've also gotten rid of the photography. I don't think it works with this type of document, and therefore I've made the headers into typographically driven splash pages, which kind of evolved naturally into using block shapes of rectangles and lines to make something representative of their name. Here's some documentation as to the changes I've been making:

With the cover, I slowly stripped away all the elements, and left the most basic of type presentations. I wanted to create something more immediate than the direction that it was heading in. I feel like the design I've gone towards is much more enigmatic, it's mroe likely to insite a cult following with ti's simplicity than something a sovercooked as what was going on before.

Initially I toned down the script font 'prelude' in the interview spreads like the image immedietely below.

I still didn't think this was working and wanted to use the Bebas type more predominantly, so I played around with using that and geometric shapes to come up wit type that illustrates the subject a little, here the words are placed on top of a black rectangular shape that could represent a shelf. I think this is quite a visually appealing approach to take and so I applied it to all of the 'interview' spreads I'd been working on.


And her'es the development for pianos become the teeth, I've used white rectangles to represent the idea of teeth, the last representation there-of in these images is the most successful.









Used a chart like series of lines to represent the idea of a table, thankfully it also looks a bit more abstract than that too, which means that it doesn't look as tacky as it potentially could have done.

With the Kinsella Chronicles, I kept the magnetic type writing, I felt that because it wasn't an interview, that a different style is perhaps appropriate, it's also the most successful of the prelude script wiritng I'd been working with. I simply modified it to work without a photograph by using the high contrast reversed out black spread to make the page seem a bit more dynamic.

And here's the development for my castle, your castle. I've used the idea of speration of 'mine' and 'yours' to create a final design that utilises the high contrast between white and black that emphasises this theme.

And here's the final design as you can see the two opening spreads had stayed the same. These worked effectively before and I was reluctant to change them. From this issue a branding element to the pages becomes obvious; band interviews do not use the script font, instead using bebas and geometric shapes to make an appropriate high contrast splash page. Other articles tat are not interviews use a mixture of prelude and bebas in order to continue that theme running through the book.

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