The Edition
A multi-issue magazine that aims to provide GBDA students with a platform to showcase their creative talents and efforts.
A multi-issue magazine that aims to provide GBDA students with a platform to showcase their creative talents and efforts.
A physical publication for students in to showcase their artistic/ creative efforts.
Editor-in-Chief, Junior Editor
Jan. 8th, 2018 - May 17th, 2021
16 weeks per Edition
Adobe Indesign, Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Adobe Photoshop
Digital design ha taken a massive step into the spotlight in recent years. It seems like everywhere you look theres new people joining the industry and promoting their own personal brands and portfolios. Looking around, it's not hard to feel overwhelmed about making your own design voice heard in a very concentrated market. That's where we try to help.
The Creators Collective is on organization created by GBDA students for GBDA students. We aim to provide students with a platform to express and present their creative work and build their own creative platforms. The Creators Collective has a wide variety of initiatives and content channels to help designers showcase their work and develop an audience for themselves, with The Edition being the forefront of these efforts
Originally developed as a fold-out brochure called Demo125, The Edition is a publication created with the sole intent to provide GBDa students with a platform to showcase their creative talents and build connections in the design world. We hope to build a strong neutral platform which aspiring designers can use and make their own.
Think about the amount of content we consume on a daily, even hourly basis. The Internet has become aggressively oversaturated nowadays and the only way to get your message out there is by doing something different. We felt that taking The Edition back to a physical print publication was the best way to differentiate ourselves and establish our quality and platform throughout the University of Waterloo. And after all, holding a physical copy of an artists work in your hand will never beat just looking at it through your phone.
Starting as a Junior Editor for The Edition's premiere issue, and eventually moving into the role of Editor-in-Chief, theres quite a few hats that I wear in order to create fully developed finished products that provides a professional, high quality platform for our readers and contributors to utilize.
No project is made successful without a strong team behind me that are eager and hungry to build an amazing publication. It's my job to make sure that we find students who be will a good fit within the team. Along with recruitment, on-boarding is a big part of what I do as well.
My primary role as the Editor-in-Chief is the overview and management of the publication from start to finish. This means working with my team to develop a meaningful theme, create a visual identity with my team, and brainstorm fresh new features that can be incorporated to make The Edition better; along with delegating and providing consistent feedback to my team during the production phase.
With designing done and the magazine ready for production, I'm responsible for working with printing services to get a quote and manage printing timelines. Making sure that our readers are able to get a consistent output of The Edition at the right times is crucial to continuing to build out a strong audience.
The foundation for any successful Edition is a cohesive team dynamic that pays dividends during crunch time later on in the production. Starting off each semester with a small hangout session with my team is my way of building strong relationships with my team. Bowling, drinks, or just a good old fashioned get together; any way I can make my team feel more comfortable about working together for the next 4 months.
Every Edition begin begins is designed around a key theme developed by my team and I. Developing this theme usually comes on the form of a sit down and discussion of a wide variety to topics and whats going on in our lives right now. The goal is to draw from our surroundings and events going on and use that to make a prompt that we aim to build the Edition around.
Building out a meaningful theme is the start of creating a publication that speaks to readers and creates a strong connection to the content when they read it. It's at this stage we collectively begin to start documenting our thoughts and ideations on Figma in order to for our content writer to to get an understanding for where the letter from the Editors will be going.
After developing a theme that we're happy with, the next step is building the visual foundation that's going to be the identity for each Edition. It's important that the visual identity is cohesive with the theme chosen to create. a well-developed experience for readers.
Starting off the the visual identity development with an initial dump is a great way to create a pool of sources which can then be whittled down to create a visual identity that the entire team is happy with. Split over 2 to three iterations, this process i a great way mr me to get my team heavily involved at an early stage and give them more responsibility to give 100%.
after my team and I have all gotten to a point where we think that the visual identity is at a working stage, it's my turn to go in and make any final refinements before creating the final visual guide that will be sent out to my team and the Marketing team to create promotions and social content. These can be small changes like changing out two colours that might not work together as well as a we though, or larger one like removing or reintroducing visual elements that might not. work with the theme we aim to convey in each issue. The final visual guide is then packaged into a small PDF for easy access for my editors and marketing.
With the theme and visual identity established, it's time to get into the real meat and potatoes of the Edition; the content. Over the last two issues, my team and I have slowly begun to integrate some content from our side as well, to create more of a dialogue between students reading the publication and CC. While the focus is still to provide students with a platform to showcase their work, we hope to be able to build out our platform to a point where we can empower students through educating them as well a giving them a place to grow their brands.
Working with my team, specifically content writers, we create a basic outline of topics we want to cover within the issue and once again begin whittling it down. With the constraints we have with the number of pages we have to work with, it's imperative that we are choosing topics that we believe will have the most positive impact on readers in a concise manner.
This is my favourite part of any Edition issue; the design. This is the time where I get to really work with my team to flex their creative talents and put it into their designs. I believe in letting my team work off an open canvas and then with the help of feedback and iterations we can fine tune their work into a cohesive design that fits along their the rest of the teams work. The design stage is broken across multiple iterations throughout the semester, because going back to look over something is alway a great way to find something that can be improved or fixed.
Going through multiple iterations of layout design and structure as. seen above gives the team the chance to really make sure that we are creating an issue that works to empower the submissions we get, with the layout being a great way to make things stand out more. The use of shapes, colours and supporting design features are a great way to get the artist work to leave an impression, and it's the part of the process that really makes all the long nights working on putting the Edition together worthwhile for my team and I.
When all is said and done, there is nothing more impactful than being able to hold a copy of each issue of The Edition in our hands and truly appreciate the work that goes into each issue on a semesterly basis. As someone who has been a part of The Edition's journey from its very first issue to where it has come today, it's safe to say that it's given me a feirce appreciation for a media that many are quick to disregard.
