Yesterday I had lunch with S. He’s always been a great advisor with excellent ideas, so I’ve met him to discuss my Master’s Thesis idea. I told him about the dilemma I have: I want to learn a lot about magazine structures and therefore like the idea of building a consistent magazine structure with more than one issue. But I also want to get better in designing pages; and here I have the (last) oppurtunity (before the great tentacled kraken of work life captures my soul) to actually design in very different styles. S. had the great idea to set “learning goals” for the different magazines.
So now I have to ask: What do I want to learn, actually? The first goal, obviously, is to learn about the magazine structure; the organisation of the content; the editorial site of a magazine. The second goal? I’ve already mentioned that I finally want to get my teeth into magazine design history; I especially want to learn more about other great Editorial Designer. And the third goal could be to learn more about the “craftmanship” of magazine design and typography: Because I like structure so much, I’m a huge fan of grids - but I feel like I don’t know 100%, but only maybe 60% about them.
So I have the research topics for the three magazines. The next thing to do is to think of the three different styles in which I want to design my magazines - and the three topics for the magazines. After agreeing on these nine elements, I will have three columns and three rows in my Morphological Matrix. Structure, yeah!
Another great thing happened. I finally hold it in my hands: “Designing News” by Francesco Franchi! And man, it’s so GOOD. I usually use books as triggers to new ideas: When I’m reading a book, every other chapter my thoughts get inspired by a specific sentence or phrase and move to the space in my brain where ideas are made (making ideas mean mostly combining them; it’s my own Mind Morphological Matrix, so to say). Reading the first part of seven chapters in Designing News took ages…I was constantly with my eyes in my brain instead of on the paper. (I made the experience that my thoughts are flowing better the more abstract the text is.)
And that’s when I rethought the magazines I want to produce in the next four months. The last two dotview magazines are full with websites; they are actually printed website. On each spread are a) website elements like header, footer, sidebar; b) the actual online article and c) comments of the readers. The comments made my magazine special: I brought the opinion of the reader into a print magazine; not only in the letters-to-the-editor, but on every single page. That’s why I called my magazine “Magazine for Comments on the Web”.
Well, yesterday was a moment of epiphany when I thought: Away with the articles. Radical simplifying is the way to go. So now I will try to get the next issue full with just non-journalistic user-generated content: comments to articles, blog posts, chats, Wikipedia articles etc. Well, I still have to define what a “user” is. Is an author for Svbtle or Medium too professional, because they choose who can write and who can’t? Maybe that’s the selection criterion: Only if a platform gives every single user the possibility to contribute, it’s a truly non-professional source and therefore perfect for my magazine.
I also had a first idea for the starter pages in the beginning. In the last weeks I’ve thought: “Well, my magazine is about comments. And the web. I have to bring something in the front of the magazine about the web or comments. Why do I have the feeling that this will be super geeky?” Yesterday I had a better idea: Let’s focus on the form instead of the content. Remember that I praised questions a few days ago? The idea is to ask the same questions every single issue, but about the different topics I cover. I still have to think of the right questions. Is it about the history of the topic? Do I let Google Search autocomplete questions that I then answer? Will it be always a huge infographic? Let’s see. But yes, things are moving forward. I’m happy.