June 2020 – swoon

VCD101

When going into Task 2, I was prepared for a big challenge. After moderately using InDesign for Task 1 I felt I was familiar with the program, but there were so many features I hadn’t touched or ever used before, so I was hesitant on how to make my design skills show through. Especially with the task being completly text bases, it was a challenge for my visual eye, but an exciting one.

What Did I Learn? Good question. I learnt a whole lot about working in Adobe InDesign. At the beginning I didn’t believe in myself, I thought it would be hard to be creative with just text, hard to show my individuality and design flare. But when actually undergoing the task, it all came out. I was able to show what I could do,I was able to work surprisingly well while educating myself on how to navigate my workspace and pages in the program. I learnt about myself as a designer, that digial design and typography are very underated elements of design. I myself was overlooking them before taking on this subject, like who looks at text? UM EVERYONE. I never realised how much I took for grante din the capablity of something like text and typography. And how much as simply enhancing of space, or a increate in font size could change a design.

What was most challengeing for me, was working in the confinds of the grids and margins in InDesign. As a new to digital creating artist, I have been used to blank canvas’ and paints. So going into the task, I began designing just by my eye, I was ignoring the grids I had initally set out. But after tweeking designing and thinking that “this is what a marker would like to see”, I said no! I’m going to try and be as free as I can be with designing task, and get creative with composition. I started using my grids and quickly my individual designs started to look more cohesive with themselves, alot more uniform and sleek.

Some things that I’ll be able to take on for future projects in the Adobe Designing world is the ability to understand the basics of the programs. This may seem like a no brainer, but for me it’s really important. In the past I’ve tried to get the knack of InDesign and the designing suite and given up because I couldn’t understand of I got frustrated and couldn’t find the joy in digital design. But now, after been giving the freedom this task allowed, I was able to find happiness in what I was doing in the in my digital workspace. I was able to still see me in my designs and not computer-robot-nonsence, but me as a designer. What i’ll also take with me is the important of the grids and guides, they are there for a reason. USE THEM.

Overall, I am over the moon with what I was able to accomplish with this task. I couldn’t really the horizon with how the end of this would end up looking. I had very low expectations of myself. But I was able to design someting I’m very proud of.

My very first design concept that I stuck with until the very end 🙂

AFTER AND BEFORE GRIDS AND DESIGN CHANGE

Chàe Media was created by myself and my partners Emma Jenkins and Chelsea-Lee Bastable with the intent to inspire students and to get their talents out there by using chàe as a medium. We’ve broadened our website to not just be a place where our writers blogs can be found, but a place where all our content could be accessible.

The product or service we are offering to our targeted marketing of students, specifying more to females, is an aesthetically pleasing one stop digital medium for all “lifestyle” content (skincare, makeup, fashion etc.) but also a place to find study and mindfulness tips to balance out their young adult lifestyle. This relates directly to the concept of ‘The medium is the message‘, Lasswell’s formula says the message goes from the communicator through the channel (medium) then to the receiver which causes an audience analysis leading to the audience effect. We’ve tried to create our own medium here in our website. It is the channel in which the audiences are meant to receiver our content and also external creators.

We began early ideating by outline the differences with our original idea “Chàe Magazine” to transforming it into “Chàe Media”. In our early content we we’re happy with the audience’s interaction with the upgrade, but as time progressed, we found we had to narrow our content even more.

We we’re mainly female based in our analytics, so we figured a facelift was in order to reflect that, so we began prototyping. This actually happened very fast as we found a colour palette we liked and create new branding overnight

As a team we felt we couldn’t continue to keep pumping out the amount of content our medium needed so we brought on more writers and creators who would be able to just solely create content for chàe, whilst the three of us could focus on the design and organisation side of our new brand. What would assume would take a really long time in recruiting happened naturally and really fast so we we’re able to get delegating immediately.

Since gaining a team our “advertising” for the content we have been producing, our team is able to quickly share and repost immediately to their different followers which has made our interactions look more active than in the past. We had planned to make our YouTube page more active like our Instagram and twitter had been, but after COVID-19 pushed us into isolation we weren’t able to follow through with that plan.

What did go to plan, is the upkeep of our bi-annual magazine. We launched the 3rd issue of chàe magazine, with our new and improved look. We were able to see a noticeable spike from our medium “Issuu.com” where we upload the magazine. The only thing we aren’t able to find statistics on is how many people downloaded the PDF from our website.

We’re very proud of the moves we have made as a team and the progress that has happened to our ongoing project that is CHÀE MEDIA! You don’t get to control much content out in the media, but having created a platform like chàe for young people to showcase their abilities and find guidance online, makes the internet just that little bit more wonderful and hopeful.

Resources:

Month: June 2020

final reflection

the medium is the message, and that is chàe.