COMPASS: DIGITAL MAGAZINE

CASE STUDY

VIEW THE PROJECT

INTRO.

 

Compass magazine features successful local businesses within the north-central area of Utah. In this digital publication, Compass will be highlighting the following stories:

 

  1. Bear Butt: Outdoor Gear Business
  2. GOGA: Goat Yoga Business
  3. Joe’s Cafe: Southern Breakfast, Lunch, and More
  4. Penguin Brothers: Ice Cream Sandwiches Business

 

The goal of this publication is to establish a clear, consistent, and effective visual identity for the Compass magazine to ensure that users will have an optimal digital experience through the Mag+ platform.

APPROACH.

 

I wanted to feature stories of unique businesses around the north-central part of Utah (since I wanted to learn more about local businesses). Out of the four businesses, I found three of them online through Facebook advertisements, Instagram, etc. The one business that I actually found locally, on UVU’s campus, was GOGA.

 

One day after walking home from school back in the spring of 2017, I saw two guys with goats and had to stop to ask them what they were about.

 

By talking to them, I learned that they had a business “where goats and yoga meet.” Fast forward about a year, here I am working on a project covering their story. I wanted to cover stories of businesses that were unique in their own ways like GOGA, so I reached out to all of the owners to learn more about their businesses.

 

In order to get content for this project, I contacted the four companies and asked them the following questions:

 

1. What’s the history of your business?

2. What inspired/motivated you to start this business?

3. What’s your mission?

4. What advice do you have for marketing a company/building a brand?

5. What does success mean to you?

6. What career advice would you tell your younger self when you were starting up your business? For example, what did you learn from your failures?

7. What are the benefits of working for yourself?

IDEATION.

 

One of the first things that designers must go through when starting a new project is to organize their thoughts on paper. Therefore, to get a better idea of what my project was going to be focused around, I organized the content that I’ll be including onto sticky notes. I planned on having a total of eight pages or verticals.

 

Publication Map

Initially, I was going to cover the stories of Bear Butt, Haugen Creative, GOGA, and the Penguin Brothers but since Haugen Creative never had the chance to get back to me, I decided to replace it with Joe’s Cafe’s story.

 

Structure Map

Each gray box represents a vertical or page within the magazine. To create a well-structured project, I included the following elements:

 

  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Help Page
  4. Bear Butt
  5. GOGA
  6. Joe’s Cafe
  7. Penguin Brothers
  8. Advertisement

 

I organized the verticals into three separate sections so that it was similar to a layout of a book — beginning, middle, and end.

Vertical Layouts

IMPLEMENTATION.

 

Once I collected all the assets that I wanted to include in this project, I began plugging them into my vertical layouts. The hardest part was grasping how layers worked in the Mag+ plugin for Adobe inDesign. If I wasn’t careful, sometimes I placed things in the wrong layer and it would break certain elements or even the entire vertical. Paying attention to every little thing I did when making this was extremely important for this project. I’m usually detail-oriented but I had to be EXTRA detail-oriented.

 

Mag+ 101

Within the Mag+ plugin, there are predefined layers that I had no knowledge about. Even though I didn’t understand the layers very well in the beginning, over the course of this project, I became really familiar with the layers.

CONCLUSION.

 

Although I wasn’t able to effectively master all of the features the way that I would have liked to in this publication, I now have a better understanding of the Mag+ platform and feel confident that through practice, I will be able to develop a more well-designed, tablet-centered digital publication in the future. With this project, I ran into many problems that were difficult to fix. Luckily, by collaborating with others and getting advice from them, I was able to fix most of the issues that I had within Mag+. To view the final product, check out the video below:

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© ELLIE HOYT © 2018