COP - Making the Publication

There were a lot of parts to putting together this publication, from the printing, cropping, binding etc. Here's a few photographs of certain parts of my process and how I went about doing them:

I've learned the importance of always remembering to print colour bars, crop marks, and registration marks. It makes for much easier assembling at a later stage.

I used a long folded spare sheet to wrap around each individual spread before using the bone fold to get precise folds, this essentially stops the publication getting marked or shiny from the folding process.

I fashioned myself a make-shift 'horse', so that I could properly poke holes in the pages.

Binding was a long and tedious process, but with patience it came out pretty well in the end, and serves the versatile function of separating the sections of the book which was my original intention.

COP - Tear-Out Poster Artwork

This is the piece of artwork I designed for my publication. It makes up the front cover for the magazine, and it also comes as an A2 fold out poster. I thought it was appropriate for the imaging on the cover, because it does a good job of setting the tone of voice for the publication. It certainly mirrors a lot of the themes I've covered in the essay itself, being: sex and the virtual identity, sexuality and exaggerated personifications of oneself in a made up environment etc. I'm really pleased with how it's turned out, I think it's a really cool image and it got a lot of great feedback when I was putting my stuff together.

In terms of the actual creation, I used a high res photograph from a pornographic shoot (I'd provide a version but it's quite explicit). I then made vector versions of the emoticon faces to paste into the scene. Once I was happy with the composition I applied a filter to make the image fit together more seamlessly.

It's also worth mentioning the 'hidden' emoticon I inserted too, at a glance you assume that what you see in the image is indeed the male's penis. However the more keen observer will notice it is in fact the infamous 'aubergine emoji' and not a penis at all. Again, this whole system challenges the embedding of sexual culture into our everyday social and virtual lives.

COP - Branding my Publication

So I've got my concept: A publication that hosts a variety of articles related to the field of emerging technologies and Virtual Reality. The name I came up with for it is simply a stylized anagram  for it: VR, it's short and snappy enough to grab someones attention.

This is what I came up with. The typeface is called Novel, and I'm really fond of it. I deliberately picked a serif typeface, the reason being you'll notice there's a custom made ligature connecting the two characters. This is the concept that holds my brand together; I wanted to merge the two characters together, to symbolize the merging of 'Virtual' & 'Reality'. Upon reading through my essay it becomes relevant that this is a topic I've heavily looked into, making this exceptionally relevant.

I'm pleased with it. Not only does it look great, it also nails the theme of the written work conceptually too.

COP - Proposing Ideas for Practical & Visual Research

The content and theme of my essay is on virtual reality, new technologies and the role of the visual communicator. I've came up with a few different possibilities for what I can do for my practical work, but the idea I'm favouring is as follows:

I'd like to create a mixed publication, that's primary function is to host my essay, as an article response. With a mixture of photographs, added articles and journals. The content I've got ready at hand to go straight into it includes:

- The 3000 word essay I've completed on VR and new technologies.

- The Transhumanist declaration, which is an article I've looked at in detail to anchor the findings I've made and justified against the development of certain technologies.

- Mark Zuckerburg interviews, on the purchasing of Oculus, facebook's future etc.

- Oculus articles that I've looked at in my research.

- Articles from sections of academic resources I've looked at, ie New Media: A critical analysis.

There's also ideas of content that I could generate myself, which include a few smaller ideas:

- A photography series of 3D rendered objects transposed into real life

- And real objects transposed into a 3D context.

- I had an idea to create masks of emoticons that we see everyday and photograph those in context.


My plan is to make a collated piece of editorial, that is one-off by nature. I'm under no illusion that I've got a small time frame to work from to complete this work, and for that reason I've decided to make each individual piece of work separate that joins together in a fashion that collates the entire piece. This means I can keeping adding sections to the publication as they're completed, and I can realistically complete at least some of the sections I've talked about.

For this reason, I want to make a booklet style magazine that varies in size, stock and processes that will all be bound together using a practical and versatile method of binding: stitching. Plus, this again means I can keep adding to the piece if I find I've got the time to add elements.

To get an idea of the aesthetic style I'm aiming for I've got a couple of pieces of research to show: