PlayOn Magazine
PlayOn is a gaming magazine designed as part of a university module assessment (MED4110 Visual Design, Birmingham City University).
The brief asked students to create 12 pages for a magazine. We had complete free reign to make the magazine on any topic, with any contents, with any design choices (provided we could justify it in the 5 minute pitch and 1,500 word report)
I decided to make a gaming magazine aimed primarily at young women aged 15-25, as this is a gap in the market that has yet to be successfully filled. Of course, there are many gaming magazines out there, such as PC Gamer, PC Informer, Edge, Official Xbox 360, and Official PlayStation magazine that women can and do read, but research showed that women do not have a gaming magazine aimed specifically at them, and I thought it would be interesting to see how the audience would affect content and design choices.
Cross-Media Product
For the 'cross-media' product we had to make as part of MED5101, I designed an article from PlayOn as if it were on Snapchat Discover.
By taking screenshots of various pages of Snapchat and taking inspiration from existing Snapchat DIscover magazines and articles, I managed to make authentic-looking pages with the help of iPhone mock-ups.
Once I had the idea for this, I enjoyed doing it as it was fairly different to anything I'd done before, except perhaps designing a Trashion! app. It was an interesting challenge to cut down the article to make it a more suitable length for the format, as well as having to design it with page scrolling in mind.
