We were given this brief and assigned our groups. Each group was given a starting point for the project. Our viral campaign would try and encourage people to read more. We spent time thinking about which area to look at and how to specify this brief. We thought about various different areas but the two we liked the most were encouraging people to read news and encouraging people to read novels. We decided that looking at current events had more scope as to what we could do for a viral campaign. As a group we had more ideas for this and stronger ideas. We went away and individually did some research that would inform the creation of this campaign.
Some of my initial research is shown here on my design context blog.
Shown above are the notes that I took when we all got together as a group after going away to do some research. We decided that our target audience was students in Leeds as this was accessible to us.
Josiah bought in a publication called the week which aims to provide unbiased coverage of the news from that week. This was something that really helped us to form our ideas.
We thought about what our outcomes could be and decided upon a zine, a video, a twitter account and possibly posters. We wanted the zine to include a summarised, unbiased report on some of the top stories from that week. The zine would include illustrations to accompany the reports and would encourage readers to get involved by giving their opinions via twitter. We felt that the combination of multiple platforms would appeal to the target audience of students and encourage people to respond to the publication, thus increasing our web presence.
We spent time thinking of a name for the campaign and the publication. We decided we wanted to focus on the aspect of everything being on twitter within the name. 144 news was the one of the leading contenders for the name as we originally thought twitter allowed 144 characters. That night I spent time coming up with some logo ideas. Shown below is one of the ones that I liked best.
When we next met up we realised that twitter in fact allows 140 characters. I showed the logo anyway as it would be easy to change to 140 news. Although the group liked the logo they said that they felt it looked too much like an official news channel and we were going for a more friendly image.
We spent time as a group coming up with new ideas for the name of the zine and twitter page. We decided on 'One40' after experimenting with different ways to format this name. We felt it rolled off the tongue, was memorable, fitted with the idea of the twitter characters and the combination of letters and numbers made it more visually interesting.
We thought about the format of the actual publication and toyed with the idea of showing two contrasting sources and giving our own unbiased overview. We decided that finding two contrasting sources for each story might be too difficult. We decided instead to write our own short summaries that were under 140 words long. This fits with the name and although we realised it would be difficult to inform people of all the important details in this format we decided this wasn't that important. The aim of our zine was to get people interested in reading more and after seeing our zine they could go and research further if they chose to. 140 words isn't an intimidating body of text so more people would happily read it and this may spark some interest.
Deciding on the name started some interesting discussion and we thought of some ideas which as a group we all liked. We decided that we would print 140 copies of the zine and also have it avaliable online. Each zine would be stamped with the logo which we decided would have a forward slash in front of. This was we could number each copy and people would know which issue number they picked up. This would provide an element of exclusivity which we thought might build hype.
We decided to have the zine split into different sections in the same way that a newspaper would be. The sections we decided upon were; World, UK, Strange, Tech, Sport and Politics.
We also came up with a mission statement which summed up the purpose of One40.
"One40 is an Illustrated zine that aims to provides students in Leeds with an informative, balanced and concise overview of current affairs.'
After compiling and distributing the news stories that we decided to use as content we all went away and wrote tweets for the stories that we weren't going to feature. We also had to write two articles under 140 words on the featured stories as well as doing illustrations to accompany these. The featured stories I got were the Uganda Anti-Gay Bill and the Legal High; Doxylam. My illustrations for these stories are shown below.
My idea for this illustration came after seeing some of the posters that Ugandan citizens were using to protest for the Anti-Gay bill. I felt that some of them were so ignorant that compiled they would illustrate the ridiculousness of the situation. I drew the illustration by hand and then scanned it in and edited it in Photoshop
This is the Illustration that I did for the Doxylam story. I wanted to shock people by really pushing the fact that Doxylam is a legal high. I decided to do this by showing it being sold in a way that is an accepted part of our society.
We compiled all of the stories and illustrations into the zine. As a group we decided on a minimal layout and chose the typefaces Leberkass Grotesque and Apercu. We also decided on the final version of the logo.
Josiah put all of the content into the framework and uploaded the PDF to issuu so people could access it online.
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