Journal
Our project for this semester was to create a magazine based around the concept of “surviving the 21st century”. Sounds simple enough. However nailing down a solid idea was quite tough. Although I am fairly happy with my final result I feel I made my life harder than necessary with my subject matter.
Initially I wanted to do a totally clean book about recycling and the environment the usual sort of information you’d get in a magazine but I thought this was too bland. I wanted to make a punky arts and crafts underground graphics , arts and culture magazine where many topics are looked at and discussed from fashion to social issues to music to art.
After looking at many magazines I decided a mixture of some of my favourites would be perfect
So I took influences from Vice, juxta pos , idN (international designers network) ,Computer Arts and Grafik to help me to think of how I would structure my magazine , I liked the informal journalism style of Vice ,the Arts and crafts style of International Designers network , I like the size of Computer arts and I really enjoy the general style and finish of grafik
The treatment for my article was based around that in my magazine there was a “what if” column where they speculate current affairs and issues and with global warming and pollution being a prevalent issue my article was based around an extreme idea of what could happen and how it would effect people in the way of how bad could the 21st Century get?
The back-story behind my article was that because of the irresponsible and over use of fossil fuels the earth’s atmosphere has slowly become more and more poisonous and weather patterns became more severe causing huge population shifts around the world. However before this in the early 2000’s after the success of the “EDEN PROJECT” many of the more developed countries star ted building “EDEN SITES” around important cities that were crucial to their economies. The “EDEN SITES” were built in much the same way as the Eden project Biospheres except on a much larger scale that incorporated housing and workplaces they were perfect self contained atmosphere controlled cities & when Agriculture became impossible many biospheres were developed strictly for agricultural purposes. However the “EDEN SITES” can only sustain a small portion of the population so when the selection process of who could live and work and live inside the “EDEN SITES” people had to be left out. How would this effect human morale?. What extremes would humanity have to endure to persist on planet earth would humanity as we know it even be able to stand these sorts of radical change . Taking ideas from the old Russian revolutions when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and you had a distinct divide between the haves and the have nots and taking from this I really wanted to get a Russian constructivist feel to key parts of the work.
I am happy with the overall design of the magazine especially the contents layout , I just wish I had taken more time to write the articles up and to make better dummies and just planned my time better however I am confident in saying that going to get my work printed at an external printers really lightened the burden of worrying about printing . I feel if I had just kept my idea simpler I would have achieved a much better realised outcome but I am happy none the less with the actual designs of my work .
