Chàe Magazine became my Digital Artefact much later in the semester. After my first idea had hit a wall – I was able to quickly start a new DA with a group of my closest friends. What began as just a small exciting idea blossomed into something better than we all could have imagined.
We started by ideating – Chàe started was a no name project, it wasn’t even a magazine yet. We just knew we all had talents that we wanted to use, but didn’t know how to incorporate all of that into helping people. (Helping people was the core of our project – we all felt passionately about mental health and we wanted to create something that would be useful to people). We decided in the end of that big discussion that we would produce a magazine – with the audience being students, like us who needed a helping hand – and the name “Chae” slowly followed. We wanted all of us to be literally in the magazine, so the name is exactly that, the intial from each of our names (Chelsea, Hannah, Amy, Emma)
After we knew what we wanted out of our project – we decided we would assign roles so each of us had a kind of task to perform for the group. A project as big as a magazine, (that had the likes of frankie as our inspiration) we knew each of us had to take on a lot of responsibilty. We assigned roles which eventually changed again and again through time – we found it hard to just stick to one thing as each of us had to do multiple task for the magazine. I, for example, started as the Marketing and Social Media Director – which eventually became the role of Amy. It also became a hinder to my passion for design personally – we found together we worked better together on the Social Media posts. Amy is more articulate than I am, therefore better with her words, and I’m better at using my eye for design. But we only discovered this later on through working on the magazine.
In saying that we all started as editing each others work, but I myself dread the though of editing words, I much rather edit a photo on Photoshop or a video for the YouTube (which is now what my role entails as Design Editor). And Eventually we found that Emma enjoyed editing the words the most, and she’s really good at it, so she eventually landed on the role of Editor of the magazines textual elements. Chelsea is the only one who has stayed as her original role from the start, Art Director as she’s always been passionate for her art making. The challenges above all was that we all had to become writers and we had to become our own bosses, giving ourselves deadlines and dates to stick too.
Working in a group has had it’s little challenges. But our advantage as a group, is we all started as friends before anything. So our work load has always been shared, we’ve had the ability to talk to each other about everything we’re stressed about or really excited about. We’re so proud of the “end” (of semester because were continuing our DA) result with Chàe. Words can’t describe how baffled we are, that we actually pulled it off and will continue to do so.
swoon 