Print Design

Take 5 Magazine

Background

A Different Take on Jazz

Jazz has a vibrant and fascinating history that has influenced much of the music we’re listening to today. Unfortunately, Jazz is often associated with stuffy old men, hotel lounges, and Kenny G elevator music. In addition, it’s largely overlooked and forgotten by younger generations. It doesn’t help that many of the popular jazz magazines seem visually outdated and aren’t an accurate depiction of the vibrant, improvisational, collaborative, and dynamic nature of Jazz today. So how do you change the perception of an entire genre of music so it appeals to a younger demographic? In our quarter long class on publication design, I created Take 5, a quarterly magazine devoted to the state of jazz music today and its intersection with other genres, cultures, and arts. Jazz has influenced almost every genre of popular music that we listen to today, including R&B, Hip-Hop, Gospel, and Country, so Take 5 aims to a new audience to the ways it is unknowingly shaping their culture.

Client

SCCA School Project

Skills

Layout, Typography, Art Direction, Photo Editing, UX Design

The Problem

Print and Digital are vastly different mediums with their own strengths and weaknesses. Though nothing beats the physical feeling of holding a magazine in your hands, print design lacks the dynamic experience of digital platforms like video and audio. This poses a challenge: how do you translate the physical experience of reading a magazine into a visually similar but interactively different web experience?

Design System

The goal of this project was to develop an application where users can input the streaming services they have access to, and be able to browse all of the content conveniently from their phone. The app will have information on ratings, cast, trailers, and more to fully optimize this tool as a content discovery resource. Users will be able to add shows to their watch list at varying degrees of priority to help stream the decision process, track what they’ve watched, and keep a list of their favorite content for go-to recommendations.

Interactive

It seems strange to read about music without having the context of what it sounds like. But how do you create a seamless audio experience that works alongside the written content? While audio and video can easily be integrated into a digital platform, the printed medium is lacking in this experience. With over 70 million paid subscribers, Spotify was the solution, specifically, Spotify codes. By integrating Spotify Codes into each article, readers can easily scan the code with their Spotify app, and queue up a tailored playlist for the article they’re reading. This creates a more dynamic reading experience. I strategically placed the codes at naturally occurring pause within the content so they don’t detract from the articles.