Structure, System, Form

Tara Banatwala
8 min readAug 31, 2021

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Communications Mini — Project 1

Day 1: 08/31/2021

For the first project, I was assigned the print magazine Rolling Stone and was put in a team with Ricky, Hannah, and Olivia.

Initial Analysis

We were made to identify overarching design decisions, qualities, and adjectives we noticed in both the website and the print versions, along with overarching themes and visuals.

For the print magazine we noticed:

  • frequent splash pages with full images, text placed on the top of the image
  • a lot of style variation across the pages
  • photos and infographics that broke up the grid or border
  • the main color scheme of red, yellow, and black with accent colors to distinguish different sections.

For the website we noticed:

  • not a lot of “room” to breathe — the page seemed very full
  • a clear hierarchy
  • most images feature people and figures (Print as well)
  • darker red to highlight the categories on each of their pages.

We identified adjectives to be bold, loud, unapologetic, eccentric mainly because of the tense margins, scale of the page (9.5 by 11 inches), intense photography with subjects usually making eye contact, holding strong poses, and cutting through text. These adjectives that were portrayed visually were definitely in line with the content — pop and counter-culture that support the music world seem to be the main focus.

“Staying true to its mission to tell exceptional stories that illuminate the culture of our times, Rolling Stone is an authority for music reviews, in-depth interviews, hard-hitting political commentary, and award-winning journalism across print, digital, mobile, video, social and events.” (source)

We began looking through the different editions of the magazine and collecting visuals and choosing the design layouts we thought best represented the grid structure of the magazine.

The main fonts we identified were Graphik, Georgia, and Publico Banner. However, there was a lot of font variation in different sections and these seemed to be the main consistent fonts used. We also identified the main colors used in both the web and print versions.

Initial typefaces we found and color schemes

Research into History:

  • founded in 1967 in San Francisco by Jann Wenner
  • “I thought rock and roll needed a voice,” Wenner writes. “A journalistic voice, a critical voice, an insider’s voice, an evangelical voice — to represent how serious and important music and musical culture had become.”
  • Shortly after Rolling Stone came out they realized teens/younger generations could be a profitable audience → began to design to appeal to teens/younger audience
  • “In the process, the magazine itself became a kind of celebrity. It stood for something. It was a symbol of what the kids were up to and how they were turning into their own kind of bourgeoisie”

Photography:

Incorporates dynamic images, the cover pages especially places heavy emphasis on portrait photography where the subject usually holds eye contact with the reader thus engaging their audience and exuding confidence. The pages as well are photography heavy where images overlay text and dominate pages effectively to hold attention throughout without being repetitive.

Covers across time

Day 2: 09/01/2021

We spent the first day organizing all our research along with sorting the magazine pages into their respective sections. We did this for two editions — February 2021 and July 2021 — in order to see the consistencies and differences of pacing the structure. Finding PDFs online took a while but seemed to work much better than scanning the pages with our phones.

Screenshots of spread pace organization between the two editions

Writing down the specifics of content in each section helped figure out bigger themes and motifs in visuals, along with helping us understand the purpose of visual and stylistic decisions taken by the publication.

Following this, we choose spreads that we thought had interesting grid structures or ones we thought were visually appealing to us.

Initial grid analysis — trial and error

After much trial and error, I soon realized that on many spreads, the grids were very hard to find and didn’t seem to remain consistent throughout the magazine.

Day 3: 09/02/2021

Studio Work Session Feedback

  • Look at different spreads in the same section — “grids over time” — same grid
  • Compare to a standard magazine — scale
  • How many issues a year — production values
  • Grid change — creative license to shift the grid
  • Type changes
  • The agency that did the rebrand — customized
  • Zoom in and talk about specific issues
  • Clusters and bursts
  • Have a hypothesis that you are working towards and that gets conveyed in your presentation.

I think zooming back really helped us get over our struggle with the grids. We went back and looked at different spreads within one section to try and find similarities. Because Rolling Stone has so many different sections along with a lengthy amount of pages (154), I think this piece of advice was especially important to us.

We found that the grid structure is consistent or inconsistent correlated with the type of content present on the spread.

Consistent grid — Inconsistent grids

With a good chunk of our research and grids complete, we began creating our presentation slides. Rolling Stone as a magazine and website has a lot of visuals, color, and bold headlines. We wanted to create slides that

  • didn’t distract or compete with the images and visuals
  • reflected the style of the publication — we decided to use the same body type family as them
  • stuck to one or two colors so as to not distract the viewer and maintain consistency.
Thumbnails for slides
Initial Presentation Slides

Here is an example where we experimented with adding color to the Macro Overview section and how that didn’t work visually both with our presentation theme and aesthetics.

Experimenting with color

Link to our first draft presentation: V1

Day 4: 09/05/2021

Dry Run Presentation Feedback:

  • What’s common among the three logos over time?
  • How do they distinguish themselves?
  • ‘Can you SHOW us the scale?
  • What is “Overview Content”?
  • Should each segment of information be color-coded in the Macro view?
  • Show a naked spread before you overlay the grid.
  • Perhaps one spread at a time would be more effective?
  • I would love to see the images in context.
  • Like Nat Geo, I would love for you to use descriptive words to enhance the reason for the typographic choices.
  • Nice use of motion to show the responsive quality of the website. 90/10? 85/15? 60/40? Clarify.

I thought the dry-run presentation was really helpful, we learned a lot from not only our feedback but how other groups tackled the same subject and how they decided to focus their presentation. It gave us a clear indication of how to move forward and make changes. We realized there were some structural flaws to be changed along with making a much tighter and well-intentioned script.

Day 4: 09/06/2021

As we continued making our changes to the structure, layout, and details, we asked Yoshi for some additional feedback on our slides which was really helpful to nail the final touches.

A few things he mentioned:

  • talking about type at the end feels out of place to me? Often type dictates the feel + approach of the grid structure and pacing
  • Although well-intentioned, I felt that this navbar confused me as it would restart after each section.
  • Try to stick with full-width images
  • Scaling the mocks to the same width feels off to me? I think it’d be best to show them at actual scale compared to the mac.
  • The grid structure is still quite hard to see here. Possibly just showing one spread and rolling different pages behind the grid?
  • I think knocking the 1990 + Present covers to 50% opacity would help!

Day 5 and 6: 09/08/2021

For the next two days, we worked mainly on the script, cutting out extra information, working towards shorter slides with an emphasis on visuals.

We thought it would be a good idea to type out exactly what we wanted to say for each slide as a group. Here is a link to a google doc where we compiled and edited our script. This helped us get more familiar with our parts as well as each other, thus making the presentation flow better.

We practiced a bunch of times and timed ourselves. There was some debate over holding our laptops to read our script vs. an index card vs. no script for the final. After speaking to Andrew, we decided on holding a paper with bullet points so our voice wouldn’t be obstructed and we could engage more with the viewer.

After several iterations, we were finally done and we will present it tomorrow in class!

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