#emergeto

The Friendship Project is one of the mini-documentary series on Emerge Magazine in upcoming weeks. The project follows Anne on her journey to discover if the people we see every day online are really our friends. 

This will be marked down as the final blog post for Emerge, and the final blog post of my university career. Today was the conference and everything went amazing. The turnout was great, the speakers were great and the way our graduating class was able to work together was even greater. I volunteered as a photographer and although I now have back pain from standing up for so long, I enjoyed every moment. I got to run around capturing key moments as well as some behind the scenes shots people do not normally see. I've uploaded the majority here but still have a few more left to add.

Overall this semester has been a great experience, between working on the magazine, working with my team in general and working at the conference, the amount of effort put in by students and the end result is incredible.

My head is very scattered at this moment with things I'd like to say, so I'll just make a quick list of things I want to mention:

1. TRENDING IN CANADA!! WOOO (congrats to Robin and his social media team for achieving your goal, I know how badly you wanted this)

2. Congrats to the PR team for organizing an amazing conference

3. Reminder to everyone who keeps saying Emerge is over...yes the conference may be done but the magazine is not! So I promise to work really hard during the summer months to make sure production runs smoothly and the magazine produced is the best one yet. The way I look at it is, the conference was the cake, and the magazine is this icing. (And everyone knows the icing is the best part)

4. This one is just a thank you to my visual identity team. Sam, your hard work for the magazine and the conference was outstanding and you have been an amazing leader for our group. You came up with numerous creative ideas and although you had many people in your ear asking you to do things, you pulled through with minimal to zero complaints, bravo. Dustin, you took on branded content and I can honestly say without a word of a lie, your designs are outstanding. The way you have been able to bring your pages to life had me wanting to make my own layouts better. (You know how much I love your UMBRA page). Sarah, my partner in crime, you have been my design partner this semester. Also being my roommate, we worked together creating layouts late into the night while consistently bouncing ideas off each other. I appreciate you telling me when something on my page didn't look quite right, and even more so when you tried to find ways to fix it. And finally to Raha and Amy, clearly you both were the life of the group. You two always brought energy and positive charisma to class, and had an endless supply of ideas to share, it was great being able to hear so many unique and creative thoughts.

Now to avoid this turning into a valedictorian/sappy run on speech (more than it already is)..I will list my "list of things I did this semester" below and then try my best to wrap this up.

Here we go: List of things I Personally Accomplished

-Putting together portions of the semester plan at the beginning of the year

-Adding ideas and feedback when deciding on style guide and brand guidelines for the magazine and conference.

-Provided constructive criticism to group members who created layouts. And also applied their criticism to my designs.

-Contacted Image Arts students as soon as we came up with our first cover idea to get them to start shooting.

-Attended meetings with John and Jasmine outside class hours to discuss layout, paper types, fonts, the gatefold, etc.

-Provided feedback and criticism towards potential cover ideas, as well as contributing my own. (We still have yet to decide on which one will actually be used).

-Spoke to photographers and writers both before designing a layout so everyone could provide input and feel like they helped put together the final look.

-Pitched an idea for the photo spread to the image arts students

-Proposed the idea of having two versions of stories written: one short version to allot for space in the magazine, and a longer or full version to be put on the web.

-Participated in the many pagination meetings held to decide the order in which the pages will appear in the magazine.

-Arranged a meeting with the Image Arts students to see if they had any ideas for the photo essay thus far, and then reported back to my group.  Although the photo spread is still under works, I am still in constant communication with Shelby (IA student) who will be sending me all 6 photos as soon as they are shot and edited.

-Was in constant communication with Michael Brown to see how progress with stories was coming along and if there were any new drafts I could input into my layouts.

-Got promoted to “Assistant Creative Director”

-Had everyone send me their layouts they had designed so far and printed out each one to put up on the bulletin board to see how the magazine was coming along.

-Designed the “Nerd Culture” page for the mini magazine, and worked with Sam to design the other pages.

-I will be staying on during the summer months and coming into the school a few times a week with Jasmine to ensure the magazine is finished and sent off to production without a hitch. During this time I’ll finish off any pages that were not completed by the end of April as well as working with Jasmine and Michael to ensure the magazine is as aesthetically pleasing as possible. (Let's win some awardsss!)

-Volunteered as the photographer for the actual Emerge conference. I stepped in as a photographer for the Image Arts students because they were short one person and needed someone to help take photos of conference speakers (which were then uploaded to Flickr periodically throughout the day). And I also shot behind the scenes footage and b-roll material for the video team to use.

-Created mockups for the photo spread

-Designed “Nerd Culture” story (4 pages)

-Designed “Women’s Rights” story (4 pages)

            --> The photographer asked for help shooting this story so I was able to track down and find two models for her to use. I acted as the medium between the models and photographer to arrange a time they were both free to do the photo shoot.

-Designed “Future Gazing/Rant” story (1 page)

-Designed “Editor’s Letter” page (1 page)

--

Well this has been the longest blog post ever, so Nick, if you are actually still alive and reading at this point, thank you very much for being such a supportive professor. It's been a pleasure being in your class two years in a row. Yourself, as well as seeing pictures and updates of Ruby will be greatly missed.

Since last week, I have received the photographs for the Women's Rights story so I have begun editing and working with in my mockups. After our class, Sarah and I met with photography to see if they had any ideas for the 6 page photo essay and am happy to say brainstorming is under way. I have also continued working on layouts like usual.

Our team again worked on pagination moving pages around trying to figure out the best possible order for all pages. Sitting with Michael, we discussed fonts, font types and whether or not specialty fonts (like the one I used for nerd culture) should be used. Some argue all stories should have the exact same fonts, while others say having one or two stories with a unique font could add visual diversity to the magazine.

The biggest difficulty in the last week was with photography. The photos I received for my story were not exactly what we have envisioned and thus it has been decided a re-shoot may be necessary. Although this will require extra work, in the end I think it is better to have a final product we can all truly be proud of.

Being this week is the final program meeting, I hope to be able to get all questions answered regarding the conference.

However on the visual identity side of things, I still have to get into contact with other photographers to see how their progress is coming along for their assigned stories. I also need to get final drafts of stories from journalism students so I can begin finalizing and perfecting layouts.

I'm also in contact with Shelby who seems to be the one shooting the photo essay- so I'm trying to answer all of her layout questions and assist her anyway necessary.

That is all for me!