PROJECT 1 

PUBLICATION DESIGN:

POST-INTERNET PRINT ARTIFACT




Scenario: The year is 2025, and what we used to call the internet was wiped out by the great sunspot storm of 2023.

Your assignment is to find a born-digital, web-native publication and bring it into a physical format as a means of preserving it for after the (imaginary?) media apocalypse.

In the process you should formulate an idea or perspective about how the translation of your content into a new form addresses an aspect of publishing we've discussed (form, content, context, audience, distribution, filtering, framing, amplifying, etc.).

Due to our remote instruction we will be using print-on-demand services to print and bind our publications.

  • Identify a native-digital publication (construed in the broadest possible sense) experience, or curate a collection of native-digital content
  • You may also identify a born-digital archive
  • You may approach this curatorially and bring together a variety of sources of types of content from the internet
    • Create a physical artifact publication output from the born-digital publication, considering:
    • To what extent is the visual character of each similar or different?
    • What is lost? Either through media-specific limitations or intentional choice: e.g. video or animated gif becomes a series of stills, hyperlinks are lost or become another way of navigating a text in print
    • To what extent are the distribution mechanisms similar or different? Make a diagram distilling means of distribution similarity/difference
    • Parsing video or audio content, e.g. a podcast or youtube video

Sample Content Ideas:

A Website that hasn't been used/updated in a long time
    - An out-of-commission blog, for example

Audio/Visual content
    - How do you translate audio into a physical form
    - What can you do with a transcript that you can't do with the video

Technical Components:

Use Adobe InDesign or comparable Desktop Publishing Software to generate a print-ready PDF in CMYK color space.
Use a digital-native workflow to output a print-native artifact.

Don’t have Adobe or InDesign? Here are some alternatives:


Production

We will use print-on-demand services, specifically NewspaperClub and Lulu

NewspaperClub
Formats:
Digital Tabloid: 289mm x 380mm (11.38" x 14.96")
Digital Broadsheet: 350mm x 500mm (13.77" x 19.66")
Resources:www.newspaperclub.com/choose

Lulu
Formats: Book/Magazine
Vary from Pocket Book: 108mm x 175mm (4.25" x 6.875")
to Letter/A4: 210mm x 297mm (8.27" x 11.69")

Resources
Lulu Pricing Calculator: https://xpress.lulu.com/pricing
Lulu Setup Specs and Support: https://xpress.lulu.com/faq#setup



Schedule and Due Dates


Sat, February 13: Introduce Project
Sat, Feb 20: Project Proposal Presentations 

Sat , Feb 27: Draft 1 due, group critique
Sat , March 6: Draft 2 due one-on-one & peer-to-peer critiques
Sat , March 15: Final Design Review

Sat , March 22: Final Submission of files to NewspaperClub/Lulu




Further Reading & References






Part 1 Guidelines: Project Proposal

  • Prepare a presentation of three (3) ideas for your final project. Use google slides or a similar presentation tool.
  • Create the presentation as follows:
    • Slide 1: The question you are asking: your hunch or intuition. It could be helpful if the question starts with “how might we” or “what are some unexplored ways to.” It could be more abstract, like “how might we rethink the relationship of author and reader?” Or it could be more concrete, like “what are some unexplored ways to explain to a low literacy person how to vote?”
    • Slides 2-9: on each slide, note an idea, the content, and the audience. You can do this in words or in a combination of sketches, diagrams, and/or words.

You will develop one of these ideas into a project. The purpose of this project is to apply all steps of the design process - research, ideation, prototyping, iteration, and presentation - towards a conceptual project.

In order for it to work this way, the following must be true, everything else is up to you:
  • The project should demonstrate, frame, or respond to a dilemma about publishing that was either discussed in class or sparked from the readings.
  • You should take into account what you can do, and slightly aim outside or above what you think you can do. Carefully decide each aspect: what is the print-on-demand format, the content hierarchy, the color, etc. Do not use any defaults, assuming that the nice engineers at Adobe or on an online platform know more than you do. Think about distribution and time in addition to any visual or physical artifacts.
  • The content must be preexisting. If you spend time writing or transcribing, you will not have enough time to focus on the design of the project.
  • Your project does not have to be useful or marketable. It just needs to demonstrate an idea about publishing. That idea could have something subversive about how you manipulate money, but being profitable is not a goal for this project. Your idea should not be a business plan. Do that after school.
  • You should have a specific audience in mind for the project. (Not “adult women 25-55” - this is not a marketing class.) Think through what your audience knows and values, and how you want to change their thinking.





PROJECT 2:


PUBLIC DOMAIN DIGITAL RE-MEDIATION



In this project, we will be reviving a literary work (from archive.org or your own source), whose copyright is now recently in the public domain, from (relative) obscurity by considering the content to be an as-found publication from a previous era, and injecting new life into it by:

(1) adding contemporary content to frame the original within today's context,
(2) re-designing the form for a screen-native experience - a single long scrolling page 
(3) providing a new context for the publication to surface it's ideas and delivery mechanism (i.e. content and form) within today's media ecosystem by either generating derivative samples or framing the form in another media ecosystem.

Using your chosen public domain work (consult Are.na channel resources) translate and augment the chosen content by designing a publication for a new edition in a digital format
    • Consider: Illustrations, interactivity, audience, time (!), how interactivity and time relate to one another
    • Content of the work must be tied to the translation and the augmentation must be related in some way to both the content and the form
    • Augmentation examples:
      • images (from public domain)
      • form elements (questionnaire, fill in blank)
      • media embeds (related posts from other media platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps, etc.)
      • textual, from other sources, i.e. footnotes, annotation, marginalia


Content Ideas:

    • Short Stories/Chapters from novels
    • Poems
    • Articles from periodicals
    • Film (script!)
    • a journal article or academic paper
    • newspaper article
    • recipe
    • Example: The Art of Making Whiskey by Anthony Boucherie
      • Contains 15 chapters of instructions, but no illustrations
      • Find images in the public domain (or create your own) to augment the original work
      • For Example, is there a Youtube video you can find frames from/make animated GIFS from


Technical Component

    • Use mobile screen size
    • Design Mockups using Figma
    • Add an Editor's Note: the circumstances you found the work in (original, already digitized/OCR'd PDF?) what you've done to the work, how you've accomplished this and why (reasons could vary from the practical to the conceptual/poetic)




Schedule


March 20: Introduce Project

April 3: Presentations: chosen public domain works & proposed content augmentation

April 10: Draft 1 group peer-to-peer review

April 17: Final file/link presentation

COLLECTIVE PROJECT:
POTLATCH OF IDEAS




Instructions

At the beginning of every week, we will begin right away with a ritual gift exchange, where each person will bring a gift for someone else. This gift will not be physical, it will be virtual: it will take the form of an idea: an image of an artwork, a video, an article, another are.na channel, etc...

On even weeks (2,4,6,8) each person will give however many gifts to whomever they please. On odd weeks (3,5,7,9) the receivers of gifts from the previous week will reciprocate by giving a gift to the person they received a gift from the previous week, and additionally give new gifts to whomever they please.

Once you upload your gift into the block square on Are.na, please change the title of the block containing your gift “Gift for [the persons name]”

You may write a short description of, or reason for, your gift in the description field.

Here is our Potlatch are.na channel

At the end of the class, week 10, we will have a collective class publication, created with a print on demand workflow using print.are.na

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