Introduction Throughout the course of this year I have found interviews to be the most beneďŹ cial means of research. Whether they are face to face interviews or over email I have discovered that interviews have aided me the most in terms of design decisions. Using my interview with Alec Dudson as a case study this publication will show a step by step guide of my methodology.
What is an interview? ˈɪntəvjuː An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to elicit facts or statements from the interviewee. Interviews are a standard part of qualitative research.
Noun A meeting of people face to face, especially for consultation. Verb Hold an interview with (someone).
Synonyms Meeting Discussion Conference Question and answer session Examination Evaluation Interrogation Audience Talk Dialogue Exchange
Interview types Throughout the year I have honed in on my interview skills, practicing lots of different techniques in order refine the way I interview and the results I receive from them. 1. Record and transcribe The first method of interviewing that I practice is to record the interview on a Dictaphone or voice recorder. I find this method one of the most effective. It allows me to focus entirely on the interviewee and the questions that I am asking. This method definitely creates a more conversational and easy going tone. It is important to make the interviewee feel at ease and not as if they are being grilled. This method is great for longer length interviews as the information is easily recorded. One downfall is that is very time consuming to transcribe the information and often there is a lot of redundant information. 2. Written recordings For shorter interviews it is more time efficient to write down notes as I am interviewing. This is a technique I practice when interviewing clients, in particular branding briefs. Unlike the first method the information is readily available straight after the interview and there is no time needed after for transcription. 3. Email conversations Emailing has proven a vital tool in my methodology. I have found that it is especially useful for follow up information. Once I have transcribed and evaluated the information it is often useful to follow up the interview with extra questions that may have gone unanswered in the original. Email interviews are also useful for saving time for both parties. However this method can also prove unreliable, due to the varying response times of the interviewee.
Interview list I have conducted a number of interviews throughout the year. I think the more iterviews I have undertaken the better my interviewing skills have become.
Alec Dudson Andy Lodge Becci Ishaque Becky Palfrey Ben Freeman DRME Hungry Sandwich Club Numiko
Self Interview Practicing what I preach i decided to compile a list of questions to answer my self.
Why do I choose to interview? I choose to interview as I think it is the most direct and efficient method of extracting information. What do I get from interviews? I think that I get a great volume of information from interviewing, the vast majority of that may be redundant but if you’re willing to sift through the information there is always useful information. Interviews often offer a unique and differing view point than your own. I think it is always important to challenge your own view points.
How have my interviewing skills improved over the year? I think I have become a lot more fluent and clear in my tone of voice when interviewing. I think I have also learned to be bigger and bolder with the questions I ask. I am now more confident when speaking What have I learned from interviewing? I have learned a wide range of communication skills from interviewing. I think that interviews have helped me grow in confidence
How many interviews have I done?
Will I continue to interview in the future?
Over the course of this year I have interviewed 10 different people and undertaken at least 12 interviews.
I will definitely continue to conduct interviews in the future. They are a great way of finding information as well as recording it.
What is the most efficient means of interviewing? I think the most efficient way of interviewing is digitally, via email. However I think that the most interesting and effective way of interviewing is to interview verbally, aided by a Dictaphone or voice recorder in order to conduct a more conversational and 2 way interview. What interview has challenged the way that I design? The interview that most challenged the way I design was a short interview with a client, Becci Ishaque. When interviewing her regarding her branding it became apparent that we both had very differing ideas about branding and design. It challenged me to design in a new way and new aesthetic. I was able to combine some of my design aesthetic with what she wanted from her branding. What has been the most beneficial interview? My most beneficial interview was with Alec Dudson. He altered the way I thought about independent magazines and there importance. This interview was a great help when writing my dissertation.
Alec Dudson In November i arranged to interview Alec Dudson the editor of intern magazine, in relation to a contextual brief that I was working on. As my research topic was about independent magazines, Alec was a great person to speak to. It is really important when interviewing to pick relevant and passionate people in order to get good responses. This interview changed the way i designed and was a turning point in my research methodology. I now find it beneficial to follow the steps shown in this case study when working on a brief.
Research The ďŹ rst step in creating an interview is to research in to the interviewee. Having background information on the person can really help guide you through the rest of the process. It also shows my willingness and interest in what they have to say.
Alec Dudson Editor of Intern magazine 7 month unpaid intern at boat magazine Successful Kickstarter campaign www.intern-mag.com
Writing Questions Based off of my initial research I can then begin to write possible questions. I form an extended list of questions, then narrow them down by which are most relevant. I always aim to ask at least 10 questions in order to generate a breadth of content.
Audio Files The next stage of my methodology is to record the interview. It is important at this stage to make sure I ďŹ nd a quiet and small space to avoid noise interference. It is also important to ďŹ nd a relaxed and comfortable place so that the interviewee feels comfortable and not as if they are being grilled.
Transcription During the transcription phase it is important to record everything the interviewee has said, when a raw transcript is completed, I go back and eliminate any stuttering or gibberish. It is imperative to create a raw transcript word for word in order to truly represent the interviewee.
In your opinion how are new magazines becoming successful? I think they are tapping in to a desire for consumers to have and buy in to variety of personally curated publications that give a really interesting personal take on any giving subject. Its good that by virtue of being independent they are free willed in subject matter and it boils down to human interest. People are often a lot better represented by new independent magazines because they cater to a far smaller portion of readers than something like vogue or GQ. With the breadth of magazines in circulation how important is it to define your audience and how do you go about it? The more that come out the more competition there is generally. If you are in to independent magazines then naturally you are open to new ones and find them interesting and keen to see what’s going on. So the trick is not just to nail down that audience, but to pull your self out as being the publication to go to on that specific theme. How you go about it is having a really clear voice. For instance there is a lot of travel magazines out there so if you are a travel magazine you need to be the travel magazine that does things differently and build up your audience and your audiences loyalty through the strengths and consistency. How can you insure longevity for independent magazines due to the niche information? These are all factors you have to consider when coming up with your concept. For me at intern magazine if tomorrow morning unpaid internships were made illegal and that was enforced to be honest there would probably be one more issue in the magazine and then it would seize to exist because the discussion is no longer there. You always run the risk of that happening. But from the people I have met that make magazines are so in to what they make magazines about, that if they were out of the industry for too long they would look to get back in to it through another title. Longevity is something you have to aspire to. A lot of magazines don’t make it past the first
issue, which is a shame because there is a lot of good ideas out there, however the financial reality of it all is often a great shock. The only safe guard against that is to research, not just in to content and design but in to the market and the process. Everything from between the idea generation to getting it in someone’s hands. Distributors, Subscription, online sales, over seas distribution. As soon as possible you have to consider the bigger picture, you have to be open to learning as you go along. The importance of printing your work as opposed to blogs? There is a lot of Internet content out there. The great thing about the Internet is it gives everyone a voice. However it also inevitable drags down the over all quality of the content because peoples motivations are completely different some people will publish stuff online because they feel strongly about a certain matter, some will publish online for a laugh, some for a joke. The bigger financial commitment that comes with printing your work weeds a lot of that out, if you are going to the trouble of printing stuff your editorial bar is raised so the need for it to stand out is greater. It is a really nice affirmation for people with talent that I try to make a point that not only are these people good enough to go in to print, but they can go in to print and hold their own with the industry that they feel locked out of. Is print more validated? There are situations where that is not the case. There isn’t any critical value for being printed in the daily star for instance. Print has different functions and implications and with in the realm independent magazines there is that personally curated feel. The fact that most of the magazines you see on shelves are treated as a tactile object there is care that has gone in to them. Unit costs is through the roof for independent magazines, they are printing a lot less and paying a lot more compared to large commercial magazines. It’s a labour of love and that is what makes them really attractive to customers that’s what makes them
such a nice thing to be involved in as a contributor, so the jostle for positions with in them is greater, so that often drives the standards up. It was always intended to be a niche topic in order to give me a chance to define a readership. The content kind of follows that. The challenge of the content is for it to remain fresh. In one sense we have a slender and narrow focus but with in that there is a constant effort to provide some consistency so that the issues follow on from one another in a coherent manor but also to go down different avenues of inquiry and keep the audience guessing to a certain degree. But your readerships response to your content affects how you curate it moving forward. The beauty of being an independent magazine is that you are a lot more nimble than a grand old institution in the fact that if users don’t like one thing but not another you can just change it. That is the beauty of being able to retain complete creative control that you can move with the times. Once you have identified your topic you need to retain an element of elasticity in order to move with the times. Have you utilised the Internet to advertise and distribute your magazine? Primary means of doing it was kick-starter, but that was always in conjunction with social media. Again if you have zero budget to start with you have to realise that there is a huge difference between online sentiment for example likes and re-tweets to people actually buying the magazine. People can like everything I post and don’t buy the mag. It is a really great tool to increase visibility but not for profit to a degree it is designed for the people selling advertising space for example facebook who are chasing clicks. Clicks don’t mean anything. I paid £8 for 8000 people to see one of our posts in their news feed, but no one clicks on sponsored links. The people who work on marketing these things will have you believe that it is guaranteed sales, but it is nothing of the sort. But it is all part of the risk of advertising, last time I saw a billboard I didn’t buy what was on it but its job is to increase brand visibility. The most direct sales knock on for us is online press. If I get
interviewed on New York Times or similar I will sell 30 magazines that day. How do you sell the tactile nature of a magazine online? People who are interested in print magazines still use the Internet I don’t think one must exist with out the other or one must be better. There are something’s that the Internet is better suited to and something’s id rather read in a magazine. You cant give too much content away online because then no one will buy the magazine, so it is an altered content online, bonus interviews and so on. It’s almost like bonus content online; you try and feed people by enticing them, if you want to get to the juice of the matter and get to the story then you have to buy the magazine. There are many strategies of trying to make the two mediums dovetail. Do you have a digital magazine in conjunction to your printed one? We have an IPad issue of our first issue, I creatively directed this project with the early Domus magazine in mind. It was beautiful interactive and you could slide away aspects, spin things. The concept was interactive design and trying to make it tactile in another, you need to get people drawn in. Apple have neglected newsstand from day one, if they’d paid the same amount of attention as the app store it could have been huge for independent publishers. They don’t market it at all, we designed it for the IPad and it exists as a stand- alone app. By the time we’ve sold that, 50% of the profit goes back to apple, the same as if it were an app, so you have to sell thousands of it to make any profit. A separate design team is needed and cost thousands of pounds. We charge £2.99 and id be amazed if I’ve sold 250 copies and that has been around for almost a year. Fundamentality if companies like apple invested more time and interest in those platforms, I think a lot more independent publishers would be looking to utilise that platform. When so many people are giving away things for free on the Internet it becomes hard to sell digital copies of magazines to that market.
Analysing data Next, I pick out quotes and passages from the transcript that I deem most important and relevant to my brief. Narrowing this down even more I may begin to look for words and phrases that have been repeated throughout the interview.
The following quotes are ones that particularly influenced my design decisions throughout this brief. Having the interview as a guide to design to really proves beneficial. The most important information i took from my interview with Alec was the importance of a kickstarter campaign, the need for a digital platform and the authority of print over digital, from this i can begin to form concepts and design.
“Primary means of doing it was kick-starter, but that was always in conjunction with social media. Again if you have zero budget to start with you have to realise that there is a huge difference between online sentiment for example likes and retweets to people actually buying the magazine.” “People who are interested in print magazines still use the Internet I don’t think one must exist with out the other or one must be better.” “People are often a lot better represented by new independent magazines because they cater to a far smaller portion of readers than something like vogue or GQ.”
“There is a lot of Internet content out there. The great thing about the Internet is it gives everyone a voice. However it also inevitable drags down the over all quality of the content because peoples motivations are completely different some people will publish stuff online because they feel strongly about a certain matter, some will publish online for a laugh, some for a joke.” “For instance there is a lot of travel magazines out there so if you are a travel magazine you need to be the travel magazine that does things differently and build up your audience and your audiences loyalty through the strengths and consistency.”
Design Concepts Based off of my initial research i can then begin to write possible questions. I form an extended list of questions, then narrow them down by which are most relevant. I always aim to ask at least 10 questions in order to generate a breadth of content.
Further research I next plan speciďŹ c research, looking in to the elements that will affect my design. The source of this research is very broad, it varies from looking at online design blogs and websites, to visiting the library. However I ďŹ nd that it is always important to extensively research. For example when creating this project I visited book stores and zine shops in order to see how my designs would work with in the space.
Final outcomes Based on the interview I produced an independent magazine. I created a range of printed ephemera as part of a kickstarter campaign. These where all elements that Alec Dudson stressed the importance of in the interview.
Final outcomes I learned of the importance of online presence from my interview, there fore i created an online outlet in the form of a website, with various links to social media sites.
Final outcomes A kickstarter campaign was also another key feature in creating a successful independent magazine concept. This involved creating a promotional video, this was something I hadn’t previously considered.
Gaining feedback As a follow up to my interviews I always keep up correspondence with the interviewee and ask for feedback on the work that I have created. For the Alec Dudson interview this proved to be very positive as he featured my work on his website. I ďŹ nd that gaining feedback is a good way of showing how you have used the information that the interviewee provided. It also helps with networking.