Nova Magazine

This year our HNC editorial design project was to reinvent the seminal 1960s feminist magazine, Nova.  Nova pioneered journalism that tackled taboo subjects and radical feminist ideas during the 1960s and early 70s.  Times change, but many of these issues are still with us, and Nova's aim is to capture a new readership in the current #metoo LGBT Fake News climate.  Some examples of masthead cover and spread concepts -


Illaria Veroli







Lewis Lee-Grant





Gemma Gorton







Murray Notman

Magfest 2016

Magfest is Scotland's largest festival dedicated to magazine publishing and is held annually in Edinburgh. This is its fifth year, and was the biggest yet, with more than 300 delegates and a great city-centre location at the Central Hall, Tollcross.  The theme for 2016 was 'fight for your audience', and all of the talks loosely addressed the state of the sector and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Magfest attracts publishers, illustrators, journalists, photographers and designers (professionals and students), and of course educators. The format consists of keynote speakers on the main stage, broken up by short panel discussions, breakout workshops in other parts of the venue, and short talks by up-and-coming magazine publishers.

This year the list of speakers was exceptional, the pitches by new magazine publishers was a minor revelation, and the general organisation, promotion and networking opportunities of the event were all first rate.  I attended the morning sessions and some of the afternoon talks - a group of our HND Graphic Design students spent the whole day and had a great experience.



My program copy, beautifully typeset by Eric Campbell.

The morning highlights included the opening speaker, Vanessa Kingori MBE from GQ Magazine, who set the tone for the whole event by looking at the challenges facing the publishing industry, and the opportunities of new technologies and superior content. It was immediately clear after a few minutes that we were all in for an absorbing day, especially when Vanessa played a cool clip of David Bowie in 1999 predicting that the internet would alter how we communicate in ways which "we can't yet even imagine".

Also up in the morning was the CEO of News UK (and former editor at the Scottish Sun), David Dinsmore, who described the huge operation the group runs across the nation, and the many successes of Scotland's best-selling tabloid newspaper.

Next up was Holland's Ernst-Jan Pfauth from De Correspondant - a Dutch-language digital magazine of crowd-sourced journalists which is ad-free and uses a disruptive strategy to operate outside of the commercial constraints normally associated with magazines.  Original content, beautiful design, and an inspired subscription model have been key to this title's rapid success. For me this was the highlight of the day, and with hindsight, a talk like this about publishing would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We also had an interesting diversion into modern Scottish politics with Angela Haggerty, editor of CommonSpace, talking about the vacuum this news platform has filled in terms of balanced journalism in post-indyref Scotland. Angela also talked about a social media platform funded by Common Weal, called 'CommonSocial'.



Lunch (in a metal box) is served.

The early afternoon talks included Terri White, Editor-In-Chief of Empire Magazine (and a former editor of Time Out New York), who discussed current trends in film magazines and the risks publishers need to take - which she duly demonstrated by playing a hilarious x-rated Empire infomercial delivered by Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool - google it.

In between these keynotes I really enjoyed the short pitches from all the new publishers, in particular the titles She is Fierce, Counterpoint, and Nutmeg stood out.  It's a pity I missed Astrid Stavro and Primate's Espen Brunborg, who talked about editorial design and web design respectively, but I'm reliably informed by our students that these two talks were superb.

And with workshops on comics, infographics and etc, there was something for everyone at Magfest. The free (and rather excellent) lunch, a set of great freelance stalls, and a fully stocked shop of Scottish titles all added to the sense that Magfest is firmly established as a brilliant event for creatives and publishers, and probably doesn't need to fight for its audience next year.

Talking Magazines

Earlier this week we had a visit from Eric Campbell, Creative Director at White Light Media, an award-winning Edinburgh-based agency specialising in editorial design, magazines, and publishing in print and online. They've been consistent supporters of the course for a number of years (Eric is a graduate of the course) and he came in to talk to the NC and HNC classes about the joys of editorial design and the general approach thats required in the niche market area of magazines.


Eric talking editorial design in the studio.

White Light Media's work includes their cool specialist drinks mag Hot Rum Cow, and Eric brought in a box of Issue No.7, and also the quarterly tabloid-sized magazine, Poppy.  Awesome stuff.


White Light samples

The NC group are currently working on an editorial brief 'Interview', so this was great timing for them.  The brief was to interview our HND students whilst they were out on placement, and find out about their experiences, and then use that as source for magazine spreads that will be included in our forthcoming annual review magazine, InSitu.

Re-imagining The FACE

It's a tradition on our HND course to set the editorial project during October, and for the last couple of years we've concentrated on digital publishing.  This year the brief was to design a contemporary treatment for a relaunch of the FACE, the seminal 80s/90s culture magazine created by Nick Logan and designed by Neville Brody.

The assessment criteria for the project combined typography, art direction, user experience and digital imaging, plus a strong concept behind the styling, theme and tone which would meet the client requirements - a big challenge given the iconic provenance of the title.


Saulius Stebulis



Dan Plunkett


As well as a new masthead and cover, each student had to design a range of articles featuring interactive content such as animation, audio, video and kinetic type.  The work was then published using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite for the iPad. The results look a little bit like this -


Sarah Diver-Lang - The FACE 


Alasdair Muir - The FACE 



Zsusi Slezak - The FACE 



Simon Griffiths - The FACE 

You can check out a selection of the covers on our Pinterest boards.  The full set of designs are published to the Adobe cloud and each student can share their publication on request.

From print to digital : Magazine design

Emil Bloom and Byron Abbot produced a series of quirky fashion articles for their editorial project. The samples posted here show the layout for print, plus a short video clip of the user journey through the digital version. Their combination of vertical and horizontal scrolling fits the content nicely to create a really engaging flow through the articles.

Fashion Editorial

The last project of the calendar year for our final year students was an editorial design. For this brief they worked alongside HND Make-Up Artistry students and HND Photography students, to produce original covers and sample spreads for either Dazed + Confused, or ID Magazine. Some of the students chose to work in pairs, splitting up copy, art direction and production duties. The brief also required print layouts to be re-purposed appropriately for iPad using InDesign's Folio Builder. Some samples below capture the essence of the project.

Andy Palfreyman & Iona Wright //  I-D











Holly Kemp // I-D











Ryan Allan & Jordan Pollock // Dazed + Confused









Emma Fitchie // I-D

Horizon Editorial

Horizon Magazine Covers, by Alasdair Muir.

With our HND groups out of the studio for their One Week Agency project,  our NC Graphics have taken advantage of the extra studio time to finish up two concurrent projects on the same day. 

Firstly, ZERO, a live brief to design a poster for a cross-campus campaign promoting Zero Tolerance to verbal and physical abuse, and secondly, HORIZON, their first editorial project, to arrange three travel articles into double-page spreads for a lifestyle magazine. We've posted some of the results on our Project Samples Board at Pinterest, and as a taster, have included a couple of Horizon magazine cover ideas, from Alasdair Muir.

Pure Preview

The Final Year students are busy preparing their portfolios and work samples for tomorrow night's review event, but they also have a big deadline for the end of the week - their tablet editorial designs.

The format and workflow for this project uses the InDesign CS6 Folio Builder and Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite, which is great news for their future prospects and should make for some exciting presentations on Friday. As a taster, here's a sneak preview of 'Pure Exhibitions', by Michal Grazewicz, featuring his masthead, cover and contents pages, plus two articles.

 

Hidden Desires

A recent collaboration between HND Graphics and HND Illustration students, 'Hidden Desires' was a project requiring a masthead and sample cover pages for a digital supplement for the iPad. Stefano Coccia (design) and Caz Levack (illustration) came up with a nice twist on original sin which we really liked.

Bringing Back Arena

Some sample work from our HND2 class who were tasked with relaunching the seminal 1980's men's magazine Arena. The original title, launched in 1986 by Nick Logan (and designed by Neville Brody), eventually folder in 2008.

This brief is the last-ever design project set by tutor David Wilson, before he leaves his post later this month for pastures new. The brief involved creating a new masthead for the title, and producing a cover and a series of spreads focussing on Arena's key themes, celebrity and style.

Arron Gillespie



Ali Kerr


Jody Hogg


Rowan Campbell



Jonathan Walton