What did I do?
I googled “What questions do you have to ask yourself if you’re starting a project” and answered these questions (e.g. Why am I doing this? How do I define success? Whom do I want to involve and what do I want from them? What can go wrong and how would I react? What are my constraints? What are my limitations?). Why I did this? To make sure that I don’t miss an important point. I don’t want to think in a few months: “Crap, I wish I would have thought of this earlier.” It’s amazing how everything takes place in your mind. Either you have the right thoughts - or you don’t. So I just want to get sure that I have them.
One thought was that I actually want to bring more diversity into my magazine design (portfolio) - that’s one goal of the project, as these questions showed. So instead of doing the exact same magazine design I’ve done in the two last issues of dotview, I should use my chance to change it as much as I want to. But in which direction do I want to go? To come closer to an answer to this question, I started to sort all kinds of magazines in a 2by2-Matrix / “topology” of the magazin design world: I placed important magazines and/or personal favourits on the two axises “Conservative / Experimental design” and “Little white space / A lot of white space”. Of coure, a lot of axis labels are possible here, but I was suprised how well this two were working for me. Such 2by2 Matrixes are also great for finding lacking supply: Maybe I should design a very experimental magazine with a lot of white space?