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!