Martin O’Dea & Luke Rossiter
The Brief Background: Satirical news is extremely popular online, with large sites such as The Onion (US) and The Daily Mash attracting large daily audiences. Concise Brief: Transition internet satirical news into a printed newspaper format. Brief: The satirical format of humour has been popular for nearly two centuries but only in the last decade has it migrated online. The aim of the brief is to provide a printed source for this online content and demonstrate a sustainable business model for this publication. Be aware of, and celebrate, the futility of taking online while online humour is ephemeral, you should produce something that will be kept and revisited.
Concept: We want to combine online sources of satirical news into one concise printed publication.We want to create a brand with character which people would also view as entertainment and a collector’s item. This form of humour is not suited to everybody, and as a result the brand needs to cater to a niche audience. Deliverables: Band and identity Printed Newspaper Tone of voice: Deadpan, serious, funny The Onion The Daily Mash
The Design Sprint (Fully documented on blog) The methodology we used for the on a process Google uses for rapid problem solving and development. We adapted the format to suit graphic design (for example by replacing the user testing with a master crit) Week 2 began with a crit that would provide feedback on the prototype which came out of the sprint. The rest of the week was devoted to developing and polishing this prototype.
The Design Sprint During our Design Sprint, we aimed to keep the format as close to the Google sprint as possible, using time-limited sprints of between 1 and 5 minutes to gain a really broad understanding of our design problem then pose as many solutions as possible in the time frame. The aim of this was to frame available. During the research stages, we ran 5 minute research sprints for a list of topics and contexts we wanted to investigate. This gave us a large body of research and During development we used techniques such as ‘crazy 8s’ folding a sheet into eight panels and challenging ourselves to sketch out immediate ideas in all the boxes against the timer.
Prototypes At the end of the design sprint, we had produced a number of mock papers to use as a prototype to be assessed in the crit. These started out as handdrawn spreads and evolved into quick digital compositions with placeholder images. The end result resembles even our early sketches despite the number of revisions we had to make in the second week to complete the paper.
Individual Progress Responding to crit feedback on our mock-up, we had a lot of work to This process started with the logo, undecided on whether to base the logo on our handdrawn prototype or to replace it with a nicely typeset option, while Luke was focusing serious typographical branding would help to offset the joke articles and strengthen the idea of the brand as a proper newspaper, out the newspaper, with one of us creating the layout while the other sourced pictures, made illustrations and designed fake the production as rapid and fair as
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Outcomes The Ubergine. Brand and Identity. Subscriber postage pack.
Outcomes is a strong, portfolio-worthy piece of print. What we have is a product which we believe is viable in the real world. One of the successes of this publication is the balance a medium where the print appears to be a real newspaper whilst including a new and clear, nontraditional layout and great content. What we found most interesting the timescale in which the work product in only 10 workdays. A future direction for the Ubergine would be to source original content from contributors, this would match the publications tone of voice and allow us to have more direction and ownership over the creation going forward.