Vending machine mock up.

Took the vectored image out of our concept boards and added in the potential vending machine/poster set up. It's quite a rough sort of image but we had the idea that the more basic we keep it at this point in time, the easier it becomes to visualise potential opportunities.

No doubt we'll try and make a few more improvements before submitting the work, but I'm fairly happy with it at this point in time.

Final Crit presentation boards

Open publication - Free publishing - More crackin

Moving on - towards resolving the brief.

It's been a few days since we've been fully active on this brief, largely due to a CTS deadline that needed meeting. Now that's out the way, we can fully concentrate on getting some decent presentation boards ready to submit to YCN on Friday.

To get things clear, we are continuing with our two main ideas that we have been developing;

- weekly pull-out student newspaper section
- newspaper vending machines, placed at various locations around university campuses

As we have a fairly clear idea of how the newspaper vending machines will look, we are mainly focussing on developing the pull-out section of the newspaper.

I've been messing around with a few sketches and put together a few layouts that are intended to aesthetically look similar to the rest of the newspaper whilst clearly being a section in its own right.

With regards to colour, we looked at the existing colour schemes used by the newspaper and selected a colour that we feel would enable the student section to appear as a section in its own right whilst not being too ostentatious (if that's the right word).

Here's how they are shaping up:

Obviously at this point in time it is only a framework, placeholder text etc; but we will try and fill as many gaps as possible in order to make it as professional-looking as it can be in the time we have.

crit feedback

Some feedback from our crit. We got some decent ideas back, mainly;

- a potential screen on the vending machine displaying headlines.
- a larger sports section, as this of course is a big part of uni life for a lot of students.
- potential vouchers etc.
- alternative locations for vending machine placement, train stations etc.

final crit presentation boards

Presentation boards for our final crit before submission next week. We based it largely on the original crit boards we designed, but obviously aimed to make them a bit more professional and effective. It was kind of a rushed job so I don't feel as though they are at all complete yet, but by the time we go to submit them next week they should be looking good. A few notable issues included the lack of our names/contact details, a proper brief title as such, and the fact that it is portrait and not landscape - landscape proves to be a much more effective format, as it works well for both screen and print viewing.

Open publication - Free publishing - More fefew grggsdv

Student pull-out concept

Quick mind map for potential content for the weekly student pull-out section. Some of it got cut off on the right unfortunately, just the graduate section bit and the twitter bit. I reckon it would easily be possible to generate enough content to fill 8 pages or so, which would be a neat little weekly addition to the paper at a very small extra cost.

It could also contain student-geared adverts to generate further revenue for i whilst being relevant to the audience.

Slight change in plan.

The whole time we've sort of slightly been discussing ideas about maybe have a student pull-out-mini-magazine type thing that would feature once a week, potentially on a Friday or Saturday. Yaf recently had a quick chat with one of his housemates, who is a student at Leeds University, who said that he liked the idea of having part of a newspaper that students could pull out and have a read. 

Me and Yaf had a quick discussion this morning to follow this up and think about some general ideas. At a basic level we were thinking that it could be a few page section that would perhaps feature an article from a different institution each week, as well as regular features. 

The individual institutions could decide a topic and nominate a writer, who could then submit an article to print. This would give individual institutions an opportunity to have a national voice and opinion on something, and could help form some kind of integral debate between universities over hot topics and current issues. 

This is the basic idea as such, and will need quite a bit of investigation if it is to be communicated successfully. On the plus side, it gives us the opportunity to mess around with layout design and type-based things, which we like quite a bit. 

Another poster idea

Another quick idea I had for the poster, though I'm not sure it's as effective as the others yet. This time the key features of the newspaper (hopefully) draw your eyes down towards the words 'Essential Daily Quality' and the price. Not sure about it yet though.

Vendor/poster concepts

 Started messing around with some visuals for the vending machine. I reckon the tall, thin approach could be quite effective; it might be cool to have a vending machine placed next to a poster of the same format, so I've started trying out some typographic ideas which could be used. Potentially they could be used on the vending machine itself, removing the need for a poster.


The first image shows a mock-up for the vending machine, and on the right is the basic concept for the poster

I quite like the idea of having '20p' as the central point kind of thing, suggesting the items surrounding the price are what you are buying into, as such. Everything around it is encompassed by the small price of 20p.

The concept applied to long, thin posters:

It was actually quite difficult to organise and arrange these words to look effective, and I don't feel it is anywhere near finished of course. Then again it's the kind of thing you can spend forever trying to perfect. At the moment it serves as an initial idea more than anything; I reckon in the time we have available it is perhaps not wise to try and be too clever with our ideas, otherwise we risk getting stuck in a rut trying to create clever print-based adverts. 

Here's where we are so far:

Vendor sketches.

Although I did plan to make a good start on the website aspect of the campaign, after some discussion this morning we decided that it should be the newspaper vending machines that form the core of this campaign.

This seems logical, as we are attempting to persuade students to BUY newspapers, more so than trying to attract them towards the website. Although the website aspect may also help, this is currently not at the top of our priority list.

I quickly threw together a few sketches of what the vending machines could potentially look like:

I think we quite like the look of the bottom-right one, the tall and thin one; it's just a little different to most other sorts of vending machines you see about...almost like a beacon. I think we'll take this idea forward and see what we can do with it..

General Action Plan

At this point in time we have several key ideas that we feel we could take forward as potential resolutions to this brief;

- i Student Forum - a dedicated area for students, offering a place for discussion as well as local information. The Independent already has a student area, although it is quite cluttered and in many ways too synonymous with other areas of the website to warrant much interest amongst students.

- Smartphone App - Those with a smartphone would have the option of receiving snippets of information when they first check their phone in the morning, in the same way they might check their facebook or email. This would tie in heavily with the 'news matrix' on the second page of every 'i', which contains very short summaries of the articles contained in the paper. Should there be something that catches the viewers attention, then they might choose to go and buy the paper on the way into university, or on a break.

- Newspaper vending machines - Just a simple one really, but it makes sense. Most students visit the NEWSagents to buys cigarettes and cans of drink, not newspapers. Potentially by placing a few vending machines in the some well thought out spots around college/university, students might be encouraged to drop that spare 20p in and see if there's anything worth reading about. More often than not there is one or two articles which will warrant the purchase; after all it is only 20p.

- Poster Campaign - This would act as the foundation of the entire campaign as such, the thing that ties the other three elements together in terms of promoting the newspaper to students. It seems like an obvious choice as well, although it is perhaps the aspect that will require the most thought and care, if it is to be effective.



There we have it, the current four pillars of this campaign. Of course we are going to have to constantly re-analyse the situation, continue researching and keeping a spare eye open for any other ideas that crop up.

However, in the time we have available, this seems like quite a reasonable workload for us to create an effective and workable campaign.

Currently Yafet has been playing around with some visual ideas for the posters, his blog is here:

http://y-bisrat1013-dp.blogspot.co.uk/

Tonight I am going to begin working on some concepts and initial ideas for the proposed Student Forum.

By Wednesday (our final crit date), we should have the majority of these elements ready for feedback and improvement, which will leave us ready for the YCN deadline which I believe is the 27th of March.

Broad Analysis

The 'i' brief set to us has presented us with numerous problems to solve. Recently we have identified a significant number of key problems and factors to get us underway with resolving the brief. To help us do this we felt it would be useful to get all the important details onto a space where we can view them all efficiently, enabling us to pick out the areas to look into further in order to create an effective campaign.

On the left we had a general overview of the situation, the who/what/where/why of the brief; and on the right we had written up some basic initial ideas kind of thing/potential strategies.

Using this we were able to pick out all the key issues and use the piece of paper in the centre to list potential directions to move forward into.

I think the main issue that needs addressing is a lack of harmonization between the digital and print-based formats used by most of today's newspapers. At this point in time they almost stand as two separate entities; potentially disadvantaging the companies selling the product. We feel that the best way  to move forward at this point in time would be to re-think the way in which newspapers are currently sold/circulated/perceived etc, starting amongst the student population of larger institutions and potentially diverging out from there.

Concept Boards

Open publication - Free publishing - More boards

Initial concept boards for the YCN brief. We kept text to an absolute minimum, instead relying almost purely on visuals to help us explain the situation. They were put together quite rapidly in all fairness, but definitely enabled us to put across ideas and get some feedback.

Re-written brief/feedback

 Our re-written brief, again quite sketchy and un-organised. Oh, and there's a tiny bit missing off the actual 'brief' section, but maybe it's a good idea to leave that blank until we've fully realised/clarified what we're trying/going to do. The main 5 problems we have currently identified are listed on the first page; these have been taken from reading the actual brief and attempting to work out what they are truly trying to say. These and the brief itself will no doubt be refined/re-written after further research and analysis.

After doing this we presented our findings/initial concepts to some of our classmates, Luke was kind enough to jot down some feedback for us, which is shown below, and below that again is a quick research action plan we drew up.

Initial Brainstorming/Analysis

 Excuse the sketchiness of these sheets, I tend to scribble a lot when doing this sort of thing. Anyway  me and Yaf spent quite some time thinking and discussing the problems presented to us, scribbling ideas and words that might be relevant to resolving the brief.  There were a few other sheets also, but they contained mostly scribbling so I'll have to go through them at some point and see if there was anything worth bringing forward.

Anyway this process allowed us to get a good idea of the real nature of the problems that the brief presents. From here we are able to re-write the brief more concisely and effectively, giving us some clear directions to take.