https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history#t-211227
https://www.ted.com/talks/jacek_utko_asks_can_design_save_the_newspaper

Print is dead. Long live print.

Got this book from the library

The introduction is very useful so far
It's basically just my essay but condensed.

Here I shall collect the useful bits to quote later.

"The print magazine as we once knew it is dead or dying. Since the early 1990s weve said goodbye to many of the magazines that once defined the newstands. The Face, Blender, Spin, Vox, Grafik, Sleazenation, BLITZ, Arena, Nuts, Front, Company, Easy Living, She, CosmoGirl, Bliss, Sugar, Teen, Just Seventeen and many more have closed. ... In the ultimate humiliation Melody Maker was merged into it's long-standing rival NME... For those that remain intact the question is no longer whether they will always be here, but how long will they hang on for."

"The obvious answer is that the rise of diital media has caused readerships to shrink"

"Back in the heydey of print we needed magazines for the information they provided. A teenager marood in a countryside town needed The Face in order to connect to all that was cool and exciting in the world. Now that digital media pervades evvery aspect of our lives print's role as information giver is now redundant. That provincial teenager? She has tumblr now."

"The faster and cheaper they try to be, the more they devalue thier product and the more readers they lose"

"Magazines make their real money from selling advertising; to put it another way, they sell brands access to their readership. The magazine is not the product for sale - its readers are. Readers are not the customer - the advertisers are. Meanwhile advertisers get access to readers in return for funding the magazine... if the advertisers can rach that readership somewhere else, cheaper, more direct and measurable - like online - then the magazine is in trouble."

"Digital attacks traditional magazines on two fronts: it erodes their readership and tempts away their advertisers."

"Fewer magazines may be being bought in total but the number of titles on offer has never been greater. While the old-school, advertising reliant magazine industry is shrinking, business is booming for a new generation of independant mags, which tend to be niche, largely ad-free, ideas-led, design focused and reader funded."

Jaime Leslie, of the blog magCulture.com, says that on an average month he sees between ten and twenty new indie magazines launch. In comparison, he says it is difficult to recall the last big launch from a major publishing house."

"Instead of moaning about the internet moving their cheese, these magazines look for ways to use digital media to their advantage"

Omar Sosa "It seems that the Internet is helping independant publications as much as it is killing big publishing groups.'

"Magazines were once restricted by geography when it came to finding the right readers. Today thanks to social and digital media, readers are only ever a few clicks, likes or shares away."

"In delivering ever faster, cheaper, ever more disposable content, digital has created a demand for something slower and of higher value, something that stands the test of time. Producers of successful indie magazines don't try to beat digital media at its game; they focus on the things only print can do. And they do them very well. They revel in the physicality of the magazine. They play with format. They mix paper stocks. They publish long, luxurious articles and photo-essays that take months to research and hours to read and absorb. They lovingly craft issues that are beautiful, collectable and timeless objects."

"The magazine is no longer an expensive way to share information. Instead, it's an affordable way to mass produce a beautiful object"

"These magazines are an affordable way to buy into a brand or lifestyle or to indulge a passion, much like a bottle of No 5 is an affordable way to take home some Chanel."

https://www.antennebooks.com
stack

Jody Daunton "aiming for a life on the shelf, not a shelf life."

Plan

It was decided in a tutorial with Fred that instead of wasting time printing and making a book, I should instead hand in the actual drawings, allowing me to spend more time nailing the aesthetic of the magazines and making good drawings. They will be explorative drawings focusing on process, mostly unplanned and unfolding unpredictably, that I will document along the way. This will allow for the best possible presentation of the drawings as the materials and colours I'm using will not reproduce well through print, thus there is little point in taking time away from drawing to do that.
I will make six A3 landscape drawings on loose themes, taking the information from the magazines and building the images as I go

Board

Here is a presentation board explaining the process of my first image.
It dissects the image and explains the explorative thought process behind the drawing.

Growing concern

My project has scarcely changed since the summer, which is of some concern to me because it seems like it should have developed somewhere but it hasn't.
It doesn't make sense to have the other magazines represented with the same drawing style as the trashy mags because they don't look like that and at the minute I don't have drawings that do represent it. Nor do I have time to establish an aesthetic for each different page in the six remaining weeks.
I don't know why I'm making it fold out to A2 other than because it would be interesting to see, which doesnt feel like a good enough reason to go insane drawing it at that scale.
Also as much as I enjoyed working like this in the first place it now feels stagnant and laborious.
I don't know what I'm saying about magazines, I don't know who this is for and I don't know where it would exist.
The work at present is explorative which is a good starting point but I feel like something should have changed about the process by now, but it's exactly the same as in summer, just less enjoyable. And it takes too long to do these drawings to be able to start in what might be the wrong direction.

But I don't know what else to do.

We concluded in the crit that I would make one of four proposed fold out booklets, one for each magazine. This would mean I'd be making entirely new drawings but all trash magazine based for one and propose three more booklets on the other three magazines. So I would have to establish the aesthetic of the other magazines because the trash one doesnt work for other magazines, as well as the fully completed trash magazine booklet, which I'm sure is acheivable but I'm not sure this is the right way to be going. I don't see a development in my work, but maybe that will come with the other magazine aesthetics.

plans

here is a plan

of sorts

I'm using the format of an a2 double sided image that folds into an a5 booklet in a cover

here is my mock up

ADD PICTURES OF MOCK UP HERE

each page is going to focus on a different magazine and the main facet of the culture of that magazine

basically i want to be able to see a cross-section of the content of each magazine in one image

so there's esquire first, which will be a general overview of the magazine with a focus on lifestyle advertising, watches cars clothes, a snapshot of the aspirational lifestyle esquire is trying to sell

the next page will be cosmopoliton, and will be similar in content but all changed to the female audience, to show the equivalence of the two and the gender divide. it will be comprised mostly of female models and aspirational products interspersed with snippets of text about the high flying life of the attarctive young professional woman

the back will be zoo or nuts or fhm, whichever one i have because theyre all now out of print so ill have to make do with what i have. either way it will be tits and wounds and gossip about men who like tits and wounds

the a3 page i will assign to trashy mags, because they have the best aesthetic and i will address the topic of their building a celebrity to tear them back down and sell magazines

below is a very beautiful and artistic sketch of my plan

basically it will read from left to right and on the left i will draw a celebrity who is at the start of their career and has nice photos and stories printed introducing them to us, the middle will be a large image of someone in the hieght of their stardom with applicable snippers around and big sun beams like a russsian constructivist poster and the right hand side will be a celebrity that has reached their expiration date and is this being hounded and torn down by the magazines, showing them tired and makeup less with perhaps suspicious white powder in their nostril

the a2 image will take aspects from all of the magazines to make one enormous image of hectic nonsense

either that or ill have one single image on this page to act as a sudden silence in the sequence of visual noise

here's some more words

and i drew some perfume ads too

workin with words

I'm trying to sort out the words that will make the structure of the drawings

i wanted to have the words down first so i could make the drawings around them and have a semblance of structure to start each image with

so ive been picking out little word snippets and trying to formulate little poems with them

either rhyming or just rhythmicly pleasing

sometimes ive just been putting the actual text in the advert 

because you just cant make this shit up

i took to drawing this guy

hes like a well groomed thug 

and he had a whole article of words about him

they dressed him up in lots of little suits and got him to stand about in them looking edgy and tough

i think hes football or something

simon baker is so yellow and funny looking

so i had three issues of esquire and in flicking through them i noticed a definite white heavy weighting in models

so i counted

and this is the only not white model in the entire three issues

there was a handful of brown men who weren't models

one was a mugshot of a criminal in a story about heroin

one was aziz ansari 

two worked at the magazine

and one was a child in an advert for a leisure centre

words are hard 

here are some

there are more

i dont know whether to just work like i was in the first place, taking the words as they seemed relevant

because this poem planning is taking a lot of time and im not sure i even want the images to be that text heavy, to fit in a whole verse

maybe ill just take words out in relation to the images and hope they kinda fit together

maybe just words that fit together rahter than actually flowing as a poem

or maybe im giving up cos im lazy

who knows

it needs more work

some drawings

some unfinished preparatory pages

the top hightlighting the ridiculous dramatic coverage of kim kardashians psoriasis 'outbreak'

the bottom a visual overview of esquire

maybe ill finish them at some point but theyre more working drawings on the way to the big one

its difficult, when to start the actual ones, i don't know. 

but theres are getting to be a formula for making so that makes things easier

pick a magazine or topic from essay about magazines

find and arrange appropriate text from magazine

fit in fitting images

add flourishes and suitable doodles to fill in the space

now comes the matter of filling an A2 sheet

I have restructured and reordered

I reorganised the content of my essay so that it fits into what it initially was
I think the question can stay the same but it's worth considering removing the social media online part because that dictates that a large part of the essay will be about online news media, which none of my research relates to. What is the purpose of lifestyle magazines seems too short. What is the role of lifestyle magazines in our society… but I detest that word so What role do lifestyle magazines play in the publishing industry? No.
Maybe I'll decide when I've written it

ANYWAY

INTRODUCTION 5-800
- suggest the decreasing point in print magazines existing
- discuss their existing and current impact on culture and lifestyle
- define all terms and lay out essay aims

HISTORY 1-2000
- run through chronology of print magazines
- establish history of magazine tricks and strategies and their development to what we recognise now
- publishers
- where chronology has lead us to now

PRINT RENAISSANCE 5-800
- current climate now, print seemed dead but is under going renaissance in arty magazines and glossies aimed at older age groups
- How where why etc.

POST MODERN PRINT 1-2000
- adapting to digital climate, ones that have are more successful than have and haven't have shut down
- online content, synthesised content integrating digital content into print magazines
- print starting to offer things the online content cant, tactile qualities

GENDER AND SOCIAL MARKETING 2-3000
- techniques and manipulation used currently
- analysis of theories like lakoff language and gender
- their reflection of society at a time
- inequality and differences in content for different target markets
- analysis of use of techniques
- comparisons of mgazines
-selling lifestyle and celebrity
- case studies

CONCLUSION 500
- print serves a purpose of existing but little else
- we need it so that some physical documentation exists
- better for adds