Brief 2 - concept + initial ideas

This year I am living with a 3rd year photography and journalism student from Leeds Met, i have known him for a while now and always been a fan of his photography work. We have been discussing about a collaboration for a while now and I feel that i am now ready to peruse this, whereas previously not entirely sure where I wanted to focus my work within graphic design, which direction i wanted to take my practice and whether my skills of a graphic designer would be good enough to work hand in hand on a brief with a photographer a basically do his photography work justice.

LINK TO HIS BLOG

We discussed ideas of what we could do as a brief together and decided upon creating a contemporary photography magazine, a magazine that would showcase his own work along with other photographers from around the world with artist profiles and interviews from professionals. The magazine would be the first of a quarterly magazine, allowing enough time to spent designing the magazine and source content, being a quarterly this also means that because the content will be greater, the price of each magazine will increase leaving enough money to add specialist print finishes and end up with a really crisp, considered, contemporary magazine.
The reason we settled on collaborating to design a magazine was because this would also go along side with one of his briefs this year; one of his briefs is to produce a piece on current affairs, which could be just a photography or a magazine or an article. Therefore we decided to combine this with our brief and have the magazine focussed on pressing issues within photography, their fore we could both work together sourcing content, he would be in charge of the photography and myself to do the design work.

These are some notes on some of the issues the magazine could feature:

- Modernism - renaissance
       - going against technology and back to a vintage style with photography.
                - apps allow vintage filters
                - hipster photography becoming mainstream
                - going back to film photography when digital is available

- futurism – accessibility of nice photography equipment with apps on phone.
                 - allowing anyone to be a photographer
                 - Are traditional techniques becoming obsolete
                 - dumbing down of photography, push of a button on a HD phone
                 - comparisons between professional and amateur

      - is it good for the industry? photographers being forced to push boundaries
      - narrowing down work for professionals

- also could include info on upcoming exhibitions as well as reviews and articles from previous exhibitions.

The magazine would be completely modern therefore the overall design aesthetic would have to follow, contemporary design, pushing boundaries, experimental, room for creative freedom - in order to keep up with competition from other quarterly magazines in the arts industry.