Narrative Self Final and Process// Deveena Sood

For the Narrative Self project, we created portraits of ourselves via the lens of the media that we use. I found this project very exciting because as a generation who have grown up with media we have a large media footprint; lots of information to explore. The following pages are some notes and brainstorms of my initial ideas for the project.

 

Above: Instructions for different Indesign skills I might use in my final.

Above: Using the readings about Graphic Excellence and Typography to inform choices for my zine aesthetics.


After brainstorming and consolidating my ideas I decided that I would focus on one media and that was Facebook. I made this choice because although I did like my initial ideas and thought they were creative the one media I have had the longest is Facebook. While looking over my Facebook I found it hilarious to see the sort of things I used to post versus how I post nothing now. I thought that it would be interesting to see how I have grown up alongside Facebook and create something like a timeline which shows this growth.

I consolidated all my Facebook information into single screenshots all the way from November 2009 till now and had way more information than I anticipated. I thought the most effective way to organize the information would be to do it by year and then have a page for my best statuses that year, what others posted on my wall that year, my birthday posts that year and what posts I liked that year. Within the pages, the statuses would be chronological. The layout/composition for this is below:

After trying this layout I did not like it and thought it would be more effective to do a coffee table book style zine where I presented my best statuses over the years still in chronological order but one status per page. This looked more pleasing to the eye and was easier for the viewer to digest. Additionally in terms of paper I went to Micheals and got Blue card for the exterior and Vellem paper to create separations between the years and erasures over the statuses. I decided to return these things because 1. my color scheme changed to using orange as the front cover color and 2. the vellem was making the book very overcomplicated since there was so much going on with my statuses already.

My final zine design had a colour scheme of orange and Facebook blue. I used orange, the complement of blue, to create a playful aesthetic and counteract the dull mundaneness of the blue. Since the book was text heavy with the statuses I used photographs of myself on the page dividers with the year to give the viewer context of how I looked when I wrote such things. I used screw binding instead of something like saddle stitch because I was replicating the aesthetic of a coffee table book which is slick and also the book was very thick so I needed something sturdy.

Final Self Narrative Zine:

My video did not coincide with my zine because I didn’t have any video content to work with on Facebook so I decided to use Snapchat. As someone who uses Snapchat a lot to capture moments of both my friends and myself, I have a lot of videos saved to my snap memories. Similar to in my Zine I wanted to show a summary of a period of time through the lens of a certain media, in this case instead of Facebook, Snapchat. Hence I created a one second a day video showing a second of every day of freshman year. (One Second A Day Video) -Click to watch my video

Compared to the zine my video highlighted more intimate moments that would never be posted on Facebook as it is a more curated form of media. I loved the distinct contrast this created. It shows how on media like Facebook and Instagram we are more concerned with what we say and post versus on media like Snapchat we are more raw and real.

To conclude I was highly impressed with the way that both the zine and video turned out. Although I did have many challenges and learning experiences along the way I was happy that I pushed myself to take risks and think outside of the box. Since I am already comfortable with Premier Pro this project helped me to learn more about Indesign which I am not the best at. I also learnt more about the printing process of books which was my biggest challenge but I now feel confident in doing. In the future, I would love to experiment with different kinds of bookbinding and also a larger sized book since I have only created relatively small ones.

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