Grids and Structure
Communication Studio Fall Mini 2
10.22.19
In this project, our goal was to familiarize ourselves with grid systems and structures and analyze how they are used in a certain magazine publication to create a reading experience. My partner Julia and I were assigned the business magazine, Fast Company, for which she was analyzing print and I was analyzing the web content.
Before this project, I was rather unfamiliar with grids; I knew the basics of how they worked and the terminology around them, but I was completely new to the idea of finding the grids from a finished design. I started there since I knew it would take me multiple times to try to get the grid structure correct.
Finding the columns did not prove as difficult as I thought it would, as the web version did not break the grid a lot. In the few places where they did break the grid had made a lot of sense to me (i.e. around the main article at the top, advertisements, covers of previous issues), so I did not get too hung up on those inconsistencies in the vertical alignments.
Fast Company uses a 12 column grid, typical of many magazines. Once I found this, I tried to break the grid horizontally. However, as I started to draw the gridlines, I struggle to find relationships between horizontal breaks other than the gutter size. After talking to both Vicki and Andrew, I tried to not focus so much on the horizontal breaks because web content is laid out based on percentages rather than a strict grid to accommodate various media sizes such as phones, tablets, and laptops. Therefore, I just broke the grid horizontally based on the spacial zones created by the articles.
After feeling confident about the grid, I started to research more about Fast Company’s history, values, their recent redesign in 2018, etc. The following information I found extremely useful/informative from this research:
- Target audience: young, creative, innovative entrepreneurs
- History: Started in 1995, founding editors both previously worked at Harvard Business Review, took inspiration from the Rolling Stones magazine
- Values: take ideas seriously but be fun, have a generational impact, make the magazine friendly and accessible
- Redesign: changed up the typefaces, make more emphasis on visual narratives, even greater emphasis on design
- Web: Bold graphics (bright color, collage-style), infinite scrolling in articles (inquisitive readers?)
At this point, this is what I understood about Fast Company: Fast Company was a business magazine looking to push the boundaries of innovation and creativity. They want to separate themselves from other magazines by being fun and reach wider audiences, and they do that through their design.
Using the information we individually researched, Julia and I started to throw together a presentation to see how our ideas blended.
10.24.19
We continued our presentation in class, explaining each of the slides we created to each other and trying to figure out more about the publication. Julia was able to find Fast Company’s media kit online, which would greatly influence our presentation later. Some of the main points I took away from this was the 55:45 male to the female gender ratio of their readers, and the median age being 43.
During this time, I continued to look into the new typefaces of the redesign:
- Grifo: head typeface, triangular serifs (modernized), intention to be gender-neutral (between the masculinity of ESPN and the femininity of W Magazine)
- Centra №1: Body type, geometric, humanist typeface, their take on Gill Sans, readable, accessible, trendy
- Simple: supplementary typeface, monospaced
- A2 Beckett: supplementary typeface, condensed
One thing that popped out to me was the phrase “gender-neutral.” It helped me realize that Fast Company understands it’s reader demographics and cares about keeping that gender split even. It shows how progressive Fast Company is, and how they are continuing the pursuit of innovation in their thought process and values.
At this point, we had a mini-critique in class with the TAs. The main feedback that they stressed to us was to have a central thesis or argument. We had a lot of individual facts, but nothing that tied those facts together in a meaningful way. Julia and I decided to shift towards an audience-based presentation because their reader demographics seemed to be a driving factor of a lot of their design choices.
10.26.19
I enjoyed the process of further researching. I found that researching other business magazines was very informative, and it helped me understand the design choices that Fast Company makes as well as how those help separate them as a brand. I had found a Forbes media kit that drove a lot of my cross-research with other brands.
I was very surprised to see these statistics from other magazines; mostly how male dominated the readership was. I chose to focus on Fortune and Bloomberg as my main points of comparison because their male to female ratio was the most similar to Fast Company’s. At first, I really did not like Fast Company’s webpage, but I then really aprreciated it after reading Fortune and Bloomberg’s websites. Bloomberg made me so overwhelmed since all of their images and text were so big; it made me feel like I was going blind. You cannot look at more than one article at a time and the page felt really dated. It looked like an older person’s take on minimalism. It was definitely not a website that I would be attracted to or ever want to read again. I was overwhelmed by Fortune for a different reason—everything was so small and similarly sized that there seemed to be no hierarchy and I had no idea where to focus my attention. It just seemed so busy and the very opposite experience of reading Bloomberg. Fast Company’s page just had a much better visual flow to it having a good organization of having articles, an ad, more articles, another ad, etc. It was a good compromise of the two websites.
Another thing that jumped out to me was how Fast Company utilized imagery. Every single article is accompanied by some sort of visual, and beyond the collage-style graphics, even the photographs Fast Company uses are more dynamic than the documentary-style photographs of Bloomberg and Fortune.
Julia and I again updated our slides to be presentation ready for Tuesday. At this point, we had what we wanted to say but had no sense for the timing of it. However, we made sure to have something finished for our main critique.
10.29.19
Julia and I had a pretty smooth day for presentations. We were about a minute overtime, which was not too stressful because by that point, neither of us had definitive “scripts” of what we wanted to say, so it wasn't as smooth as it would be for our final presentation. Overall, we had very positive feedback, especially with the visual elements of our presentation. However, there were some common critiques from classmates including wishing for an even clearer narrative. There was some debate between Sherry and Vicki as to whether we should add some sort of navigation bar to make it clearer; Sherry believed we should have it, but Vicky was okay without one. However, I felt good about how our presentation went, and I felt like most of what we had to do was to refine our content.
Critique day takeaways:
- Make our narrative more apparent (add some sort of visual cues in readership slide to emphasize our point?)
- Cut down our time (cut out some content/clean up speaking part)
- Refine visuals: emphasize points of comparison between websites, show website as it is before adding the grid on top of it, make redesign even more apparent
10.30.19
I had a meeting with Vicki today where she went through our presentation and added some more points where we could refine our presentation. She mentioned smaller points of change: making our readership page visual reflect the demographics, changing our bullet points, finding areas where we could cut more time. Vicki was also extremely helpful in helping me understand more of the design choices that Fast Company made. She helped explain why the typefaces that Bloomberg and Fortune used felt so dated and how Fast Company made contemporary takes on modern type. She also helped me explain why it is so important to break the grid on main articles. These were all extremely helpful, and Julia and I would make changes later that day in response to those notes.
Julia and I continued to edit slides as we practiced our presentation that night. Once we got to a place we were comfortable with, we each went home to continue practicing each of our parts. We were going to try to push a lot of information into only 7 minutes, and we needed every second to be used wisely.
10.31.19
Presentation day! Our presentation went smoothly; it seemed like people understood the narrative a lot better and enjoyed the edits in content since Tuesday. Our visuals and spoken content complimented each other much better and I was very pleased with our end product overall. If I were to keep editing our presentation, I would definitely try to show more about grid and structure (especially since that was the main focus of the project) and go into more of the content of the articles that Fast Company publishes. However with the content we presented on the final day, I think that Julia and I were able to successfully argue our points about Fast Company as a brand and their goals/values even without those added points.
