In every long self-initiated project there is a point where you think “Damn. This project sucks. I don’t know what I’m doing. Or why I’m doing this. It doesn’t make sense. Why on earth did I ever come up with this shitty idea?”
Well, I’m not there. Actually, I like my project A LOT. Best Master’s Thesis ever! But yesterday was an unhappy day nevertheless. I felt like I’m so deep in magazine design, constantly thinking about it, that I’m more far away from it then ever. I felt (and still feel, actually, let’s see how long this will last) that I don’t know what’s good and bad anymore; that I can’t trust my own taste or my own thoughts in the design process. And that I have too high expectations.
And suddenly I felt time pressure. Not for my third magazine - I still have two weeks and I think it has some nice pages so far - but for my documentation. After designing the third magazine, I have two more weeks to put everything in a documentation, and then one more week to print it. So in total, five weeks are left till the big day called DEADLINE. Are two weeks enough for writing a documentation? Yesterday night there was a moment when I thought “OMG NO! Totally bad planning!” But then I came back to my friend “Worst case.” Thinking of him always calms down; a very reliable friend indeed. And the worst case doesn’t look so bad in my eyes. So, yeah. Everything is still fine!
Why did I think of this especially yesterday? Well, I guess because I was so totally, totally unproductive. In the night there was a lecture by The Rodina in our university, and from 2 pm to 5.30 pm I visited an university course hold by Patrick Martin and Tobias Dahl. Each of the students had to present one magazine. The choice was often great (Apartamento, Kinfolk and The Weekender were amongst them), and I really enjoyed the in-depth analyses of grid, typeface - and structure! That’s why I was there, actually. The both tutors sent their students a link to my blog as an example for the structural analysis of magazines. What an honor! I got more than 80 page views just from these students. And in the end, Patrick and Tobias gave me a helpful feedback for my first two magazines.
And what you can see there on the top, is an shift in thinking. In the last days I saw an huge problem in the length of my articles. I’d like to highlight some articles, but they all have about the same length. And especially in the Bitcoin Part there are six articles that annoyed me because of their sameness. But today I began to see them as single part in themselves; as series of essays. So I create a bigger (highlighted!) part with putting all these articles together. Man, some things just sound obvious, but it tooks a long time to get the idea.