Firstly, if you didnt know, I love games; the culture, the designers, coders, everything. This brief for me was like creating the ideal publication for myself and my friends. The idea was not a selfish intention, rather I just wanted to share with everyone (target audience included) the fascinating and often heavily inspired world of gaming culture.
The sourcing of the information for the brief started off as an exciting venture, creating a database that mirrored my current cult knowledge of the subject as well as finding out things that I never thought existed. The hardest part was sieving through the relevant information into what was appropriate and what I wanted in the magazine, whilst adhering to the main concept of the brief I wrote up. The cover designs and type decisions were relatively easy to make, as I used existing publications and a few tried and tested methods to see how they functioned as a brief.
The cover designs were, looking back on it, not nearly as visually striking as I thought they would be, appearing more like a zine than an actual professional publication. The feedback was incredibly positive however, with a majority of people not getting round to my other projects due to poring over the information presented. Coming back to the imagery used for both the Virtual Geographic feature and the covers, I believe that this concept was indeed strong enough to carry the whole brief and give it a nice tie in. Looking back at it though, I could have made a much larger and extensive range for the brief, I just got to the "final stages" of the brief and finalised it as the deadline loomed nearer.
I do think that this is my favourite brief, not just because of the content, but the fact that I really got to grips with type and layout as I never had before, not being bored with the subject matter was a major aid in this. I got to explore experimental type in a formal way, as opposed to my illustrative type I use in my practice, which was a huge learning curve that helped me massively and will continue to do so, as I intend to discover the full range of possibilities of self-publishing in the future.
I do wish I had got the concept nailed for this earlier, but there is no point crying over spilt ink. I think that the online presence should have been fully exploited due to the nature of the brief, as well as providing me with the necessary practice to design and code websites which I could have done with for future endeavours.
In hindsight, I think I would have made this into a more illustrative endeavour, but I believe that sometimes I design not for myself but for others, trying to produce work "they" want to see. But from this and most of the briefs I chose, it shows that I dont just make "pretty pictures" but I can apply myself to a range of different briefs and ways of working, despite the average outcome of each project.
