Magazine Launch

Our Magazine Launch was last Thursday! Thanks to all of the family, friends, and industry professionals who came out to support us.

Here are a few photos from the event.

Show us the Way: Meet the Table of Contents Group

What good is a publication if you can't find your way around it? Jeff, Michelle, Beth, and Laura created the table of contents so that you'll be able to find the article you want to read--in style. Keep reading to find out how they did that.

What is your job?

We make sure that people can find what they are looking for in the magazine. We also make the table of contents aesthetically pleasing so that people enjoy using it.

Why is it important to have a TOC in a magazine?

It’s a visual representation of what’s in the magazine. It highlights what is in the magazine and helps readers find an article they want to read.

The features are awfully diverse. How did you decide to represent them all in a cohesive fashion?

It wasn’t that hard, actually.We asked each feature group for an image from their article so that we could put it in the table of contents.  In our design, each feature is cropped into a box. The order of the features was already determined, so sometimes the images didn’t look good next to each other. If that happened, we just asked for a different image.

How did you decide to work as a group? What strategies did you implement?

We decided to work in stages. Each person worked on one iteration. We started out by looking at a lot of magazines and other examples on the internet. Our inspiration actually came from a document that wasn’t even a table of contents--it was just a feature in another magazine. So from there we decided what we wanted and used the file exchange on Blackboard and sent files to each other. 

Michelle and Beth working.

Editing on the print production computer.

What went well?

Our original idea was to go with the boxes. We agreed on most things. 

An early draft of the table of contents.

What challenges did you encounter?

The images that people sent us were all so different so it was hard to treat them all the same. We were originally going to put text over the photos but that was hard to read. It was also difficult to get people to send us content. That really stopped us from moving forward sometimes.

What advice would you give students doing this job next year?

Start early. Although, it was hard to start early because we needed to gather a lot of content. But it’s good to have a general idea of what you want when you get started.

What is there left for you to do?

Just finishing up the colours!

A nearly complete draft.

First and Last Impressions: Meet the Front and Back Cover Group

Contrary to the popular figure of speech, information designers always judge books (and magazines) by their covers, and with good reason. The cover of a publication says a lot about what the reader can expect to find inside. Cam, Kassandra, Chris, and Natasha worked together to make sure that the cover of effekt represented the content, our class, and information design accurately. Keep reading to find out how they did that.

What is your job?

The cover represents the magazine as a whole and helps the entire publication feel unified and cohesive. We wanted to create something eye-catching that represented the personality of the magazine and the features inside. The title of the magazine if effekt, so we needed our design to reflect that name and the concept behind it.

Why is it important to have a good magazine cover?

It establishes the credibility and the topic of the magazine. It tells our audience what the publication is about. For this specific publication, it’s important that we represent not only this publication, but also Information Design. It’s tricky because we can’t really use words.

How does your design play into “Effekt”?

Everything on the cover is connected. Each element of the cover is affecting another element. We’ve colour coded everything to each section of the magazine. We explored the major themes of the magazine and made 8 different categories that the features fit into, then made some icons that represented them. The icons on the back cover correspond with the features. 

A nearly final draft of the cover, showing the 8 colour-coded categories.

What was your group’s strategy for making the front cover? What stages did you go through?

First, we sat down and had a brainstorming session. It turned out that that some of us had similar ideas, so it was great to start off on the same brainwave. We decided that we wanted to work on this as a group, rather than breaking the task up into individual components. Once we had a general concept, we broke off and did some sketching individually, and then came back as a group to compare. We basically followed this pattern throughout the rest of the process. 

Kassandra doing some initial sketches.

Cam and Natasha sketching.

We wanted to incorporate everyone's ideas into the final design, but we also gave each other constructive criticism. Chris started a voting system on Blackboard, and we each got to have input on what features we liked about each iteration.

In the end, we completed about 28 iterations. Maybe 10 more, if we include the initial sketches. we made a lot of small changes. 

An early iteration.

4 of the 28 iterations of the front and back covers.

What challenges came up when you were making the front cover?

We didn’t have too many problems. It was challenging to come up with a consistent theme between all of us. it was also hard to keep on top of things with so many other things going on in the magazine. Each of us was also working on a feature.

What went well?

We didn't have much conflict. It was great seeing everyone's ideas every week. We would look at an idea and brainstorm together about what would make it better. This way, we were all on the same page.

A weekly meeting, discussing everyone's ideas.

What is there left to do?

We are basically done. We are just finalizing the colours. So, we just have to put out last draft up in the lab!

Ben and Cam, making some final decisions about the cover.

Let us introduce ourselves: Meet the Letter from the Editor group

Writing the letter from the editor is a high-pressure job. This letter must capture the essence of the magazine, the class, and information design as a whole -- all in one page. Here is a little about how Kaitlyn and Lauren decided to do that.

Lauren and Kaitlyn

What is the letter from the editors is supposed to accomplish?

Well, the letter from the editor is the first thing that people read after they see the cover and the identity. So, we put the identity into words and described what the magazine is all about. We wanted to provide an introduction to the magazine, but also an introduction to information design. We figured that our audience wouldn’t know much about information design, so we tried to keep that in mind.

Why is having a letter from the editor important for a magazine?

It sets the tone for the magazine. It gives the readers a road-map of what is in the magazine. Not as directly as the table of contents does. It’s more of the feeling or the experience of the magazine. The audience we are considering are very general and broad with little to no understanding of information design. We think the letter is important to set up how we understand information design, so that readers can get the best understanding of the content.

So, who did you consider the audience to be?

People who know someone in the class, who know something about information design but maybe don’t understand what is is or how it works. We also imagined students using the magazine in job interviews, as well as to explain information design to loved ones. Basically, the audience is very broad, and includes anyone with a basic or low level of understanding about information design.

How did you decide to explain what the magazine is about?

We took the name of the magazine and the rationale behind the name and used that to really guide our letter. Since the magazine is called “effekt,” and the tagline is “effective design affecting people,” we wanted to talk about how design affects people. We talked about how information design is invisible, multidisciplinary, and ubiquitous. A few of the features talked about how information designers see the world, and also how information design can be found in places you might not expect it, so we talked about that too. The magazine is about how information design is prominent in our everyday lives but is also invisible.

Additionally, we wanted to explain information design and show the passion that the class has for it. One of the quotes from the letter is “think critically. Find empathy. Take action.” Even though information design is so diverse, we wanted to make it as simple as possible.

Qualities that describe this group of information designers.

How did you work as a group to complete these? What strategies did you implement?

That was actually pretty difficult. It’s hard to write something with more than one person. There were two of us with two different ideas. First, we sat down and had an open discussion about the purpose of the letter and the information that we thought was important for the audience to know about the magazine. So, together we developed a vague outline, which included definitions, our class, common attributes, and a brief overview of themes in the magazine. Once we had that, we worked individually to write what we each thought the definitions, statements about the class, common attributes, and themes should be. We ended up having a lot of the same ideas so we mashed them together and we had our introduction. This gave us a good starting place to go from and established our tone. Lauren wrote the first draft. Then Kaity expanded it and wrote the next draft. We are currently working on our final draft.

What went well?

It was easy to write together. Initially, we weren’t so sure. How do you decide whose idea is better than another idea? It was surprising how well we wrote together, and how many ideas we had in common. Because we had outlined everything at the beginning, it was a piece of cake.

What challenges did you encounter?

Getting started was hard. We were apprehensive because we didn’t know how to start and write together. But once we got our ideas down, things were easy.

What advice would you give to students doing this next year?

It’s very important to define your process in the beginning. You need that guide otherwise you will just be pulling things out of thin air. If you start with an outline, you can easily deal with the uncertainty of having many ideas and multiple authors.

What is there left for you to do?

Just the final draft. We recently got put in charge of the inside front cover, inside back cover and source page, so we have to create a link between these and the letter. We also have do the page layout for our letter.

Inside front cover

A nearly complete draft of the letter from the editor.

Who made this? Meet the Contributors Page Group

Our hope is that our final magazine will feel effortless...so smooth and seamless that readers might think that making a magazine is easy to produce. Of course, this is never the case. There are 24 students in our class who are working hard to create a well-designed and well-written publication. You might never know that if it weren't for the contributors page group. Deanna, Sara, Teagan, and Laura have been tasked with representing the entire class, showing our personality as a group as well as each person's individuality. Here's a little about how they did that.

What is your job?

Our job is to show who the contributors to the magazine are, highlighting something interesting about them, and connect the whole thing to the theme of the magazine.

Why is it important to have a contributors page in a magazine?

It is interesting to put faces to the articles, and to see how many people were involved in making the magazine. It shows how complex making the magazine was and how much work went into it.

Capturing the personalities of the entire class must have been difficult. How did you do that?

We decided to make an infographic of everyone’s personality traits. We didn’t want to limit the class to a predefined list of traits, we asked them to submit three personality traits and what they wanted to do after they graduated. So, when everyone gave us their lists of traits, we discovered that everyone had such diverse qualities that our infographic wouldn’t work out as we hoped it would. There wasn’t much overlap. 

Sketches for the contributors page

We ended up doing lots of iterations. It was difficult to visualise career paths when people didn’t chose something concrete. We wanted to say what type of personality types went into different what types of careers. In the end, we had to simplify our infographic from our original idea, but I think it worked out well. 

An early draft

How did you decide to work as a group? What group strategies did you implement?

We divided into pairs. Two people worked on the photo spread, and two worked on the infographic. But there was lots of communication and file sharing that allowed us to remain consistent between the two spreads.

Initially, we tried to think of concepts in terms of our photography. We put off the personalization aspect until later. At first, we tried to combine the photos and the personality information. We were talking about t-shirts or putting quotes in the photos. We wanted it to be creative and different. We found a lot of our inspiration on Pinterest, actually.

The colors we used tie into the magazine. In the infographic, everyone is connected to everyone. And our personalities affect the magazine. We really wanted to make our infographic usable and easy to read

Sara working on the photo spread

A more advanced draft

What went well?

Taking the photographs went really well. We got everyone in one day. The infographic also worked out well. And we worked well together. We were really open with one another, and gave each other feedback fairly quickly. We found that Facebook was a good way for us to communicate. 

Sara photographing Jacob

Deanna, Laura, Sara, and Teagan taking photos

Trying out our magazine's colours with our photos

What challenges did you encounter?

It was challenging when things were changing constantly. We thought we had 5 pages, but then we were reduced to 4 pages. And some of the fonts had to be changes. It was also challenging to make the photo pages and the infographic pages cohesive.

What advice would you give students doing this job next year?

Get started early. Don’t wait until the last minute! If you are doing a survey or something, do that early. We put the design off for so long because we were waiting to get our data in. It actually took 3 or 4 weeks to get our data in. And we got data that we weren’t expecting, so we ended up scrambling to figure something out.

What is there left for you to do?

We are done! Just little tweaking on the photos and making sure everything is lined up properly.

Almost done!

Who are we? Meet the Name and Identity Group

The name and identity group (Carla, Stan, Jacob, and Jamie), like the grid group, have been working hard since the first day of class. The decisions and ideas that this group puts forward help create cohesion and unity throughout the magazine. They have to work quickly, because many other pieces of the magazine depend on their creation. They also have to do high-quality work because they are representing the magazine, this class of information designers, and the discipline of information design as a whole. Here is a little more about how they decided to tackle this task.

So, what was your job?

Essentially, our job was to create the logo and tagline for the magazine. We make decisions about branding, colours, and how the logo should be applied. Our goal as a group was to create a logo that represented our class, as well as the information design program.

You chose Effekt. What is the meaning behind that name?

Effekt represents what information designers do best: make information as effective as possible. We design things to be usable and easy to understand-- for us, that what being effective is. We chose to spell Effekt with a “k” for a couple of reasons. First, it is the Swedish translation of “effect” and since our class is interested in intercultural communication, we thought this reflect the interests of our class. Second, the “k” is eye-catching and added some quirkiness to our logo.

What was your strategy? What methods did your group use to tackle this task?

It was important to us to remove all of the limitations to our brainstorming. One of our strategies was to use quantity to find quality. So, we did a lot of brainstorming, both as a group and individually. We developed a concept together, then broke off to come up with some ideas on our own. When we came together, we looked at each others names and tried them in different languages to see if they worked. Then, we presented our four favourite ideas to the class, and had them vote on their favourite. This way, everyone had a say in the name of the magazine, not just our group.

Stan explaining wordmark options to the class

Four variations of the Effekt wordmark

How did you manage to work as a group to create one name and identity? Who did what?

We did a lot of working together during class, then broke off to do our own thing. During class, we bounced our ideas off of each other and made any decisions that needed to be made. This worked well because we had the space to explore on our own time, and we could confirm that we were all on the same page during class. 

Our group meetings were also creative times that inspired our future work. For example, one of us suggested “effektive,” which is the Swedish spelling of effective. After seeing this, another member suggested shortening the name to “effekt” and put a new spin on the meaning. 

Carla and Stan, working together!

What challenges did you run into when you were working on this? What worked? 

Nothing went particularly badly, but we did find a few things challenging. First, 8am classes were hard for us...we’re not morning people. Second, we really wanted to find a name the reflected all the different aspects of Information Design, as well as the diverse nature of our class. Finding one concept that fulfilled that was difficult. Making decisions about which design to go with was also challenging. We had to leave our personal connections to the names we suggested out of the process; just because you are attached to a name doesn’t mean it’s the best choice for the class.

Lots of things went well. First, we were really good with our constructive criticism. We were honest with each other about names and designs. If we thought something didn’t work with a team member’s design, we told them. And no one took it personally. We handled this part of the process really professionally.

Another thing that worked well was presenting options to the class. We did two class votes: one on the name, and one on the wordmark. We really liked that everyone was involved in choosing the name and identity for their magazine. It was really democratic. 

If you could give advice to the students who will be doing this next year, what would you tell them?

A few things...

1. Get outside the classroom, because the classroom limits your thoughts. Our best ideas came up outside of the classroom while we were just fooling around. Remember, you are representing more than just yourself; you are representing the group of designers. 

2. Get the class to vote on your ideas. Get each member to present their best idea, and have the class vote on their favourite. This involves everyone in the process, because ultimately this is about all of us, not just the branding group.

3. Don’t get hung up on your individual ideas and designs. Open your mind up to criticism. 

Where are you at now? What is there left to do?

We are more or less done. We have to tweak the logo a little, and we are exploring some variations in terms of colour. We are working on creating a visual identity guide, but we are trying not to be too limiting with the rules. We are thinking of adding a homemade element to the magazine, like a sticker. Other ideas we are exploring are painting the logo right on the cover, or getting a special envelope to put the publication in.