Creating the ‘Write’ Article

I was super excited when we received this task to create a fashion article based off the interviews we had done in the last media session. I love to write and the idea of being able to use these interviews to write in a narrative style fashion with far more creative freedom than one would with an essay was exciting. We were given the option to write in a Q&A style or in an article style, and while I’m not a media student, I thought the article style was not only more interesting but also more useful to me as a business student.

As a focus of my article, I wanted to theme it around the future of fashion, specifically around the effects of COVID, sustainability and globalisation, with the students I interviewed as part of the real life connection within the story. I did this to reflect my desire to work within sustainability management for a company in the future.

To begin, I researched and brainstormed ideas of how I wanted my article layout to look. I knew I wanted a clean and contemporary style and also wanted to play with font and size. I also had to keep in mind considered imagery that reflected the people I interviewed and incorporated their work. I created a research page before I began, just to grapple with some layout ideas and reference points.

I also created a content order to organise my thoughts for how I wanted to structure the text in my article and create the narrative I wanted. I focused on the themes I mentioned before, using the interviews to solidify real-world opinions on them and look at fashion through a Gen Z student perspective for both design and business.

For my image selection, I chose images directly from the Instagram’s and blogs of the girls I interviewed, focusing on the more fashion and work related photos they had. I tried to also select images that I thought would be put into a magazine article if they were being interviewed in real life.

I decided to create my article in In Design as I thought it would give me the most professional-looking outcome. I used framing to line up the images, and also realised I had actually collected too many images and would not be able to fit them all in, so I decided not to use some of them. I wrote my content first on a word document to check for spelling errors, before moving it to the In Design document, where I was able to use the skills I had learnt in Adobe to allow my text to carry over multiple pages. As part of my layout, I also used decorative lines, (one red and two containing colours from Karen’s design work) to add some graphic detail to the spread. I like the clean-cut look of my layout, but I’m still unsure if it’s perhaps too empty or even too busy.

Excuse the quality of this image, the actual file was too big to upload here but will be available in a Padlet page link in my last blog entry!

I also faced some difficulties along the way while doing this task. I was quite nervous about using In Design as my laptop doesn’t run very well with high quality documents and freaked out a little when I was trying to save it as a high quality image. To prevent any loss of work, I did back up the file to my hard drive so I had a copy in case my laptop stopped working (which fortunately it didn’t). I also realised I should have taken more thorough and full sentence notes, as I couldn’t actually understand the context of some of them, which meant I inherently lost some interview information.

Going forward, I would like to present my article in my next Adobe class to get some feedback on the layout of it and make any adjustments I need to from there. Overall though, I’m really happy with this outcome and enjoyed doing this task a lot, as I felt it definitely played to my strengths.

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