Flex Design Team:
The design team consist of me as 'Design Manager/ Design Director' as well as Morwenna Smith, Nadya Pandelieva, Rachel Maria Smith, Henry Brown, Guro Lindahl Flåten and Lou Robinson (who also runs Etc Magazine). I was asked to find others to work on the magazine but decided I would let students come forward in their own time as this shows they are pro-active not re-active.
My Role:
As Art Director/ Design Director my role is to introduced larger design team managed team of 5 designers, Planning/ Organising paper with editors team work/ independent work, coordinating designers of different sections, organising and assigning newspaper layouts and ensuring constancy across the entire paper. The job requires time management and meeting numerous deadlines with the printers. Its a job I have thoroughly enjoyed but found very time consuming and stressful. Since I have worked for the paper I have I streamlined the production process, spearheaded 2011 re-design, improved relationships between the design department and editors/ marketing team.
Brief:
Flex is the newspaper for Falmouth and Exeter students. It is one of your independent student newspaper in the country and have been running for just over a year. It will soon be distributed other higher/ further education institutions around the south-east as well as locally. Flex cannot become too radial because of this audience. We need a new designer as the old designer, currently in his third year at Falmouth, is busy with his final project. We need a designer to make the magazine appeal to a wider audience but not loose the feel of Flex. We want flex to be interactive, fun, popular, student focused and cutting edge. Faced with the commercial imperatives of a print publication in the rise of new media.
Aims:
- Appeal to a multiple audience segments; students, faculty, staff, locals.
- Become as a platform for the voice of the student.
- Easy for designers to put together while being visually stimulating.
- Foundation Student.
- Undergraduate.
- Postgraduate.
- Faculty.
- Staff.
Age Groups:
- 74% 18-21.
- 15% 21-25.
- 7% 26-30.
- 4% 35+.
Social/ Economic:
- Race: N/A (no racial bias)
- Gender: Male and Female.
- Class: Mostly Middle/ upper class very few working class
- Geography: Falmouth (term time)
- Lifestyle: fast paced, course focused,
- Hopes/ Fears: employment, success,
- Aspirations/ Interest: 45% regularly take part in extreme sports
- Night Hobbies: clubbing, socialising
Analysis:
The Process - Challenges :
- Design drives the content instead of being inspired by it.
- Layout favours speed and consistency over flexibility and creativity.
- Late delivery of content.
- Article length similar and result in monotonous pages
- No dedicated photography team - low resolution images.
- Students have less and less time therefore long articles will not be read.
- Newspaper is in competition with online/ magazines. Faster, instant, more recent.
- Covers have no style they are either bland or crowded with no hierarchy.
- Each section of the newspaper look the same.
- Heavy focus on print, illustration, photography.
- New media, performance is missed out.
- Out of context facts, figures and stats are useless to audience.
- Poor visual hierarchy.
- Colour palette choices (such as yellow on white.)
- Typography is inconstant throughout.
The cover look of flex; No visual hierarchy, no color, sponsors before logo, inconsistent layout.
Long runs of body copy. Poor use of imagery.
Monotonous layout. Poorly used pull quote to save make up for white space.
Inconsistent typeface. Type use over image and does not conform to column/ grid system.
This font bleeds out at small sizes, large mount of white space look 'empty', poor use of column/ grid system.
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Left: Good use of columns/ grid system. Right: inconsistent use. Bring down double page spread.
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| Latest issue of Expose (#578) |
Competition Analysis:
Exposé, is Exeter University's student run newspaper is probably our main competition for Exeter students. It is published every 2 weeks during term time on 42 pages of newsprint.
Type: Student Newspaper
Target: Exeter University Students
USP: Free, well established (578th issue), run by students, content driven.
Style: Traditional newspaper style, departments
- 'Less news more views' approach to editorial content.
- Traditional design/ layout does not serve to elevate content. Key information hard to locate.
- Political bias and narrow target audience gives paper easily defined niche demographic and by extent focused target for advertisers.
- Similar subject matter but but more content is included given page count.
- Good use of imagery. Photography pushed but used conventionally. Cutout used for better integration with body copy.
- has 48pages per issue and seems to have more content however does audience have time to consume information?
- Content drivs design; looks like traditional newspaper with tractional values.
- Aimed at elitist university students; upper/ middle classes who are likely to already read newspaper.
- More departments, more in depth stories.
Epigram, is Bristol University's independent student run newspaper. In 2007 it won 'The Guardian Student Newspaper Award'. Published every 2 weeks on 42 pages of newsprint along side 'The Mix', the student magazine-esque publication on 12 pages online.
Type: Student Newspaper
Target: Bristol University Students
USP: Free, award winning, strong online presence, student run, 'magazine-esque sister title'.
Style: 'Guardian' style approach to design,
- More national than local news.
- Approach to design is reminiscent of the Guardian; typeface, grid system, color palette, etc.
I made a list of all the things I wanted to discuses with the team and went through them one by one; layout and grid systems, typography, colour palette, individual sections, covers as well as how we would divide the work up and the process through which we would be putting the paper together. We felt Flex needed the immediacy of a newspaper with the design values of a magazine.
Design Solution:
- Introduce more effective visual hierarchy to allow reader to easily navigate pages.
- Decide on two/ three typefaces that work well, and have range of weights.
- Limited color palette to be used on info graphics, decorative elements.
- Utilise info graphics to allow audience to visualise information.
- Utilise more photography, info graphics, illustration etc.
- Use more emotive imagery.
- Include 'arts' other than 'high arts'; new media, moving image, performance, etc.
- Create a website/ blog/ social network to show extra content, latest news, etc.
Typography:
There will be two new typefaces for entire publication. The first being Baskerville designed for body copy, pull quotes and captions quite easily. It was chosen because of its good legibility as a result of the difference between the thick and thin parts of the letterforms. We have used slightly looser leading; Baskerville will be sued at 9pt on 12pt leading where as Mercury G1 was used at 8.7pt on 12pt leading but when you realise Baskerville has a smaller 'x height' we wend up with looser leading making any long runs of copy look softer in tone and easier on the eyes.
The second being Knockout, designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, used for headlines. It was chosen because of it comes in many weights including compressed (which is space saving given the 3mm loss to the publications width) Its also works well as both display, creating eye catching headlines when used large, and body copy when on of the wide weights are used. We are using slightly looser leading as Knockout is being used on 60pt at 50pt leading for the main headlines whereas Ziggurat was used at 29pt on 25pt leading. Taking the point size into consideration Knockout takes up a lot more vertical space but less horizontal because of compression.
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| Left justified and right justified for hard news, left justified, right ragged for soft news and opinion. Each paragraph is indented by 5mm except the first. |
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| Using Knockout in condensed form for lead ins gives us the most space to work with. |
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| We all had different ideas for the names of the writers but we eventually settled on the above. |
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| Captions were only to be used when necessary as if the image cannot speak for itself then the article should. |
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| Pull quotes were a nice way for us to both break up the body copy and show what Baskerville is good for. |
Grid System & Layout:
- 12 x 12 grid system for consistency.
- Can be used a 6, 4, 3 or even two columns - allows flexibility.
- More white space
- Create a style guide for speed and consistency.
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| 570mm x 370mm. 12 x 12 grid. 12pt baseline grid. 82 lines per page. |
New Dimensions:
Paper Stock: Coldset Newsprint (25% max black)
Double Page Dimensions (full spread):570 x 370
Double Dimensions (within margins/ printable area) 542 x350
Single Page Dimensions: 285 x 370
Single Page Dimensions (within margins/ printable area) 261 x 350
82 lines per page.
Columns: 12x12 (formerly 3 or 5 columns)Gutter width: 5 mm (formerly 4.3)Margins:
The margins are 10mm (all round) except outside margin of 14mm. The newspaper was previously 10mm as this was specified by the printer because of their production process. We were told nothing could be in the 10mm margin that surrounded the paper. Morwenna Smith suggested we adopt a 14mm outside margin because of pagination/ navigation and finger getting in the way, putting the users first. I argued against it wanting to stick with the 10mm margin because of space. However as a result of adopting Baskerville as out body copy we were able to and present the illusion of white space through clever use of typography.
Baseline Grid: 12pt (to mach body copy leading)
Below is a screen shot of the visual hierarchy we are tying to achieve. Only the main headlines will be used at 60pt on 50pt leading. A smaller size will be used as we more down and across the page as the stories become less important.
Headers & Footers
After having discussion with the team about the use of the large section names the fact that we would do anything to get rid of them became apparent. We came up with the solution os using colour bars to represent each section and have the section name reversed out within the colour. This way we not only have more content for the section but allows us to use colour more sparingly.
Headers; Knockout HTF48 Featherweight 12pt, 30pt Tacking, +10pt baseline shift, Left justified (on left hand page and vice versa). The tabs are in the color of each respective section with text reversed out white.
Colour Palette:
The color palette for Flex was pretty much solid from the very beginning. Since we took over the paper the only this that has changed was 'Lifestyle' from yellow to orange as it did not stand out against white newsprint and the addition of the 'Science' section meant another colour had to be adopted being green. One o the changes happening to the colour will only be in the way we use it. More sparingly. A page will look more colourful when less colour is used in the right places then by slapping it everywhere. As a result of this we have decided to scrap the coloured headlines and use black instead as the advent of out new Pagination system we wont need to use colour so blatantly. Instead colour will be used for pull quotes, caption and other point of information on the page. It will be sued as a visual hook to guide the audience through the publication. The image below pretty much sums up how colour will be used.
Information Graphics:
One thing that was heavily lacking in Flex is the use of info-graphics. Newspapers contain many different statistics and data that are fed into the body copy, these appear in text on a page and will not always resonate with the reader. As our ever elusive audience has les and less time information needs to be conveyed to them in the shortest possible time and info graphics allow us to do that. News Sports will benefit from the greatly with Reviews and Science adopting them from time to time. We will adopt a style that is simple at the core such as using geometric shapes, isotopes and tapping into a pre existing visual culture of the target generation. The mass of information will be controlled by the aforementioned 'limited' colour palette.One thing that caught my eye was the way that Good Magazine incorporate info graphics into their publication and online content that focus on a specific subject or trend and have an in depth analysis. This is something we plan to do for Flex with large info graphics that will either go on double page spreads (preferably the centre spread, granting its available) or online where it can be views in high resolution or downloaded. Below are some samples of the day to day info graphics and the double page spread info graphics that focus on a specific topic.
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| Japan: One Year on (work in progress) |
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| State of The Industry: Job Markets For Graduates (work in progress) |
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| Where Are They Now: Catch Up With Past Graduates (work in progress) |
