Creatives at Nottingham Trent

After deciding on our idea aimed at creative students we though we would need to understand what size this demographic was at out uni. This we decided is the best place to start the zine as we have a perfect audience and belong to it too.

List of creative courses (full-time, undergraduate):

- Costume Design and Making

- Decorative Arts

- Design for Film and TV

- Fashion Accessories and Design

- Fashion and Textile Management

- Fashion Communication and Promotion

- Fashion Design

- Fashion Knitwear and Knitted Textiles

- Fashion Marketing and Branding

- Fine Art

- Furniture and Product Design

- Graphic Design

- International Fashion Business

- Mulitmedia

- Photography

- Product Design

- Textile Design

- Theatre Design

From this we calculated that this amounts to 20.6% of all full-time undergraduate courses which is 3, 840 creative students.

With this many people we could have a great demand for our Zine and create a great platform for these creatives to network with each other!

Abbie and Sofie xxx

Current Creative Networks

After looking into the Facebook and social media trend we have discussed the content/idea behind our zine and want to create an offline social media/networking place for creatives.

There are currently a few online creative networks out there:

These all however cater for the business person in the creative field. They are places to network with others and look at the latest news and jobs that are available.

THERE IS NOTHING THAT CATERS PURELY FOR STUDENTS LOOKING TO COLLABORATE, SHARE AND NETWORK WITH EACH OTHER!

We therefore feel that this is the direction our zine will take. Also in zine form it will be great as most creatives and students will be aware of the zine format and what it stands for - the low-fi production etc so it will be better than purely an informal website!

Abbie and Sofie xxx

Facebook and Social Media Trend

As users of social media ourselves we are familiar with the increasing trend and wanted to look into some facts and figures. This is because we have started to have the idea of including a social media theme/taking inspiration from it for our zine!

Facts:

45% of the population in the UK are Facebook users

Facebook has 25, 000, 000 users of which 50% are under 30!

Image:

We are thinking of creating possibly an offline version of a social media site through the zine. People are happy to stalk others on facebook and look at their updates, photos etc and so we want to take this user habit and translate it so that it works in the zine - people will use the zine in the same way as they would use facebook?

Abbie and Sofie xxx



Editorial Ideas

JUST A FEW INITIAL IDEAS I HAVE HAD about content, names, logo and the zine fair...

Content:

We could see if we could feature maybe a few local creative businesses? Perhaps Style Compare or someone similar so that they would create interest for other uni people to want to be part of it - it may have a better selling point too and could generate more sales at the fair?

Names:

mEYEn Zine? (playing on mine/my?)

Logo:

Could have it as i magazine and the dot of the i is an eye?

Materials:

When talking about leather for front cover etc...we could have a different texture for every person...say one was a textile designer we could have fabric and print to that? If one was a graphic designer we could have newspaper print and print to that? If one was a video maker (not sure what you call them) we could have film strip set backgrounds?

Selling Them:

The beauty of the idea is that if people from the uni are featured in it...they will buy it and hopefully their friends?! Which means we could sell more than 7 copies!

Layout of Stall:

If it is about creatives, and 'you' as a person then we could have long-length  mirrors either side of the desk with signs saying 'who are you' / 'you decided what you want to be!' etc? We could try and get a big stall space if we wanted for the fair?

Abbie xxx

Fever Zine Lecture

Today we had Alex Zamora from Fever Zine http://www.feverzine.co.uk/ give us a lecture on the nature of Zines.

About Fever Zine

Independent magazines and zines are a growth market and a recently successful example of this has been Fever Zine. Fever Zine is a popular quarterly zine based in London.

Its contents focus mainly on music, art, DIY culture, trends and e-culture, with fashion, music videos and other zines also featuring heavily. The zine was created and is edited, by British music and arts journalist Alex Zamora with design by Simon Whybray.

According to its MySpace profile the publication is available at a variety of cultural hotspots in London such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, as well as around the United Kingdom, however it is mainly distributed through the Internet.

The Lecture Highlights

- WIRED - we were told of how Wired Magazine linked up with Adobe to create an app for the Iphone.

•content designed specifically for the touch screen experience

•easy navigation methods, including an innovative zoomed-out "Browse Mode"

•the ability to browse image slideshows

•embedded 360 degree object viewers

•support for video and audio content

•the ability to rotate content using device accelerometer functionality

In addition, with this digital magazine concept, advertisers have new possibilities for displaying ad content. Advertisers can develop rich-media magazine "inserts" to provide expanded information to customers directly within the magazine experience — without directing the reader’s attention away to a Web site. Publishers can also offer expanded ad formats that include animation and embedded video. Finally, as is the case with most digital advertising, this new magazine concept opens the possibility for more precise advertising performance metrics beyond the comparatively crude audience measurement/ad engagement techniques in use today.

- FLICK THROUGH ZINE VIDEOS

People are starting to promote their Zines through flick through videos. They video themselves opening each page of the Zine so the viewer can get an idea of whats inside.

This is an example below:

Overall this lecture was really useful as we can consider how to make our website interesting and how to promote our Zine possibly through a flick through video.

Abbie xxx

Interesting Book in Creative Review

I came across this article on the Creative Review blog and couldn't help but think it would be a great way to present our zine!

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/february/what-no-jewel-case

It is a set of CD's and a booklet in a box...

We could have a set of mini zines put together like this (above). They would be like a small booklet (see below)

And then i love this part....it all folds out into a big poster!!!

I can't help but think this is brilliant!!!


Abbie xxx