Metal Magazine / Evaluation

Demon Magazine was my personal favourite project this year, as I felt I fully immersed myself into the brief, and had a lot of passion for it from the moment the idea was born. This brief was a self directed editorial project with collaboration internally and externally within the college. It involved the production and management of a contemporary metal magazine. Collaboration included several people writing content for the magazine.

This brief increased my confidence with managing a project by myself. I always feel the most comfortable when I am in control of a project, but at times it’s important to acknowledge you can’t do everything. The main problems from the brief was putting a lot of responsibility on myself - designing, managing emails, collecting content, writing content and organising interviews to name a few. With more help, I feel the project could have been more perfect. Even just having someone else to check the file would have been beneficial, which would have avoided small mistakes within the final product. However, I feel that managing so much of the responsibility was a great way to push myself and get things done independently. 

Communication was another area that was improved upon, as a large section of the brief entailed talking to bands and collecting content. I feel like I now have more skill in handling these things for the future. 

For this brief I chose to invest in professional production services, and requested Pressision to print and bind the magazines. If I had printed this myself, the colour and professional quality would simply not have been the same. I am extremely happy with how the magazine has been produced, and it looks like a real product. I learned how to properly prepare a file for print, including setting up a spot colour.  This will prepare me for future projects where the files must be sent to an external company for printing. 

The most successful areas of this project was concept and identity, and both of those aspects working in harmony. There is a definite gap in the market for a contemporary, stripped back metal magazine differing to the existing publications available in the genre, and has become a passionate project for me which I feel I can expand upon and develop in the future. Overall I am exceptionally proud of the project as a whole and felt it was one of my strongest from the last 3 years.