Read More
For our viral campaign the brief we were set was to try and encourage people to read more, so the first decisions to be made was what did we want people to read and who were we going to aim our final product at? So we mind mapped some initial ideas and different types of publications. A key factor in our final choice was producing a product that we all found interesting.
Considering we are all students it seemed logical to produce a product aimed at people our aged specifically those in Higher and Further education. This would also mean that once a publication was produced we'd have close access to our target market thanks to the group of universities to distribute and promote it at.
We ended up settling on the topic of current affairs, it was a subject we were all interested in and with our target market in mind we felt it was something that people our age/students needed to read more about. So next came the question how can we promote current affairs in a way that was adapted specifically to students? And how can we make ti go viral?
The idea we came up with was a condensed and interactive form of the news. We wanted to be able to sum up current affairs stories in a easy to digest way as well as create an interactive experience where people could voice and share their opinions on current events.
Our main inspiration was a publication called The Week, it takes a weeks worth of news and condenses it into one publication including opinions from both sides of an argument to different newspapers takes on events.
It also managed to soften the tone/make light of specific events by including illustrations- this was something we definitely wanted to include in our publication.
So we now had a clear product in our mind, we wanted to produce a weekly zine summing up news stories with a link to twitter and a format for people to share opinions. To fully link the product to twitter the name One40 was chosen, it would sum up stories in 140 characters, main stories would also have illustrations and slightly longer summaries attached (previously it was called 144 news until we realised it was 140 characters in a tweet not 144)
Proposal
To produce a free weekly illustrated zine that aims to provide students in Leeds with an informative, balanced and concise 140 character overview to current affairs. The publication will also have an online presence in order to engage students with the news and allow them to express and form opinions on news events. We aim to encourage students to engage more with current affairs.
The zine would need to be in black and white and printed on newsprint in order to keep the costs of production down.
Creating the Publication
We all got papers and trawled through looking for main events and divided them up into sections and each person was assigned specific stories to create headlines for, produce illustrations for and write the main stories for.
We also wanted to create a poster/pull out that summed up a bigger story on one side and had an illustrated poster on the the other. We felt this would appeal to our target audience of students and provide a collectable element to the publication. Seeing as it was very current we chose to write a main story on Ukraine summing up all the events leading to the main collision. For this I researched and wrote out the summary of the conflict and provided the illustration to be used as the image for the poster.
Although we all designed and sketched different ideas for our logo we chose to go with a design produced by Josiah. We decided to go with Joe's design because of it's minimal and simple appearance, it worked well with the black and white layout we wanted and gave off a trendy and minimalist look.
Josiah also provided the layout using a similar minimal style used for the logo, this really benefitted our printed costs with a black and white design consistent throughout.
Proposal and Feedback
From our feedback we discovered that our publication was too text heavy, and a bit too complex. So Josiah revised the design to combat this and removed some of the text from the pages.
We were also told to push the 140 concept we had running through our tweets and publication, we've already got the idea of producing only 140 copies, having headlines in 140 characters, attempting to have stories in 140 words so we though that perhaps the 140 copies of the publication could be numbered out of 140, this would add to the exclusive nature of the publication and also perhaps solve another feedback problem which was colour.
People thought that the design could use some colour, however we argued that this would make our production costs more expensive than they already were, we thought that perhaps we could make a woodblock with the logo depicting what number out of 140 the zine was and use this as a way of getting some colour onto the cover.
Proposal
To produce a free weekly illustrated zine that aims to provide students in Leeds with an informative, balanced and concise 140 character overview to current affairs. The publication will also have an online presence in order to engage students with the news and allow them to express and form opinions on news events. We aim to encourage students to engage more with current affairs.
The zine would need to be in black and white and printed on newsprint in order to keep the costs of production down.
Creating the Publication
We all got papers and trawled through looking for main events and divided them up into sections and each person was assigned specific stories to create headlines for, produce illustrations for and write the main stories for.
We also wanted to create a poster/pull out that summed up a bigger story on one side and had an illustrated poster on the the other. We felt this would appeal to our target audience of students and provide a collectable element to the publication. Seeing as it was very current we chose to write a main story on Ukraine summing up all the events leading to the main collision. For this I researched and wrote out the summary of the conflict and provided the illustration to be used as the image for the poster.
Although we all designed and sketched different ideas for our logo we chose to go with a design produced by Josiah. We decided to go with Joe's design because of it's minimal and simple appearance, it worked well with the black and white layout we wanted and gave off a trendy and minimalist look.
Josiah also provided the layout using a similar minimal style used for the logo, this really benefitted our printed costs with a black and white design consistent throughout.
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| Final Logo Design |
In order to make our zine more exclusive we decided to only produce 140 hard copies making each publication limited edition. This would hopefully create a buzz around our magazine meaning that more people would fight to get their hands on one knowing there's only a limited amount.
Proposal and Feedback
From our feedback we discovered that our publication was too text heavy, and a bit too complex. So Josiah revised the design to combat this and removed some of the text from the pages.
We were also told to push the 140 concept we had running through our tweets and publication, we've already got the idea of producing only 140 copies, having headlines in 140 characters, attempting to have stories in 140 words so we though that perhaps the 140 copies of the publication could be numbered out of 140, this would add to the exclusive nature of the publication and also perhaps solve another feedback problem which was colour.
People thought that the design could use some colour, however we argued that this would make our production costs more expensive than they already were, we thought that perhaps we could make a woodblock with the logo depicting what number out of 140 the zine was and use this as a way of getting some colour onto the cover.
Promotion and Printing
Dan, Jamie and I all took part in producing our viral video and I edit the final edition in Premier. It was a combined team effort. The idea behind the video came from Lie Witness News , using editing techniques and questions in order to make our public appear completely uniformed.
We asked students around the Leeds university what their opinion was on the events in Ukraine, their responses ranged from fully informed to one gentleman giving us a thumbs up and stating 'Facebook', either way it produced an informative yet very humorous video.
We also wanted to promote our publication using posters put up around the university. The initial idea was to have a different poster per day depicting one of our headline tweets getting people curious about current events, however it proved rather difficult to balance our time properly and only two days events were covered using the posters, however the message we tried to get across I believe was clear.
The posters were produced as a team effort, Dan, Harry and I took turns spray painting the background for the posters and Josiah produced the text design. We ran these painted pages through the printed in order to create our very attractive looking promotional material.
We also set up our Twitter page, producing the online half of our publication and a forum for students and readers to share their opinions on the current events reported in the zine. We had left a blank space at the back of the zine in order to add some of these opinions to the next issue, creating an interactive element to the publication.
Dan, Harry and I went and produced the woodblock for stamping the issue number on the back of our publication (as I was the only one with a laser cutting induction under my belt) whilst Josiah printed and bound the final copies of the Zine.
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| Producing the Zine |
We then all took turns printing the issue number and personalising each copy of our publication. We chose to use blue as it matched the colour scheme used on our promotional posters, that and it saved on ink costs seeing as I already had a pot of printing ink pre mixed from a previous assignment.
And finally we distributed the publication across the university in common student areas such as the library, the canteen and the barriers near the college entrance.
So how did it go?
Overall I believe this was a very successful project, I really enjoyed the atmosphere of working in a group, the constant feedback on designs, the ability to achieve more in less amount of time and good strong minds to bounce opinions and ideas off of was a satisfying experience to be a part of and I look forward to the next group project ahead. It was also a wonderful opportunity to bond with members of the course who i wouldn't normally speak to and despite a few organisation issues I feel everyone worked really well.
I also really love our little publication, in terms of our brief (encouraging students to read more) I think we hit it right on target. The publication was very well designed, it appealed to the appropriate target market and most importantly of all, the 300 hits received on our video in one day proves that we managed to 'go viral'. My only regret is that we'd be unable to continue our zine, as I feel it's a very strong concept and idea.
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