Blast is an online, interactive magazine aiming to be a leading lifestyle publication available online and as an iPhone app.
The look-and-feel of the magazine should reflect its cutting-edge view of art music and culture while taking the needs and expectations of the target audience into consideration.
The brief involved designing the corporate identity, a homepage and at least four other pages as well as a comprehensive navigation system.
The target audience was specified as "well-educated, style conscious 20-40-year-olds"
I decided to leave the conventions of the printed magazine platform behind and instead to portray the website as a minimalistic media go-to-hub, where various articles, music and art were available through an innovative networking system.
To allow the viewer a different perspective, I decided to base the layout of the Blast magazine website on the shape of a circle as something symbolically unending, unknowable and un-measureable. It also can be viewed as a symbol of completeness and unity as well as joining the old with the new. It will not so much depart completely from the traditional grid system layout but rather build on it in order to create a more visually stimulating piece. The circle in the picture above is designed to rotate.
The integrated rollover highlighting will inform the viewer where the clickable content is.
Through-out the users visit to the website they will encounter the ability to tamper with the website pages i.e. as shown in the picture the ability to move letters around on the screen. This will act as a quirk of sorts to emphasise the idea of a flexible user experience.
The website includes an array of animations to keep the user visually stimulated at all times.
The website includes many sound bites. Most notably on the contents page (as seen above), soundbites are activated on scrolling on the article circles to inform the viewer what said article is about.
I decided to work with a bright and vibrant colour scheme based on the CMYK colour model, referring to the four-ink colours used by the printing press (cyan, magenta, yellow and black). This is to show as example of combining the old conventions with the new.
The website includes an archive, enabling the user to track-back and view content from the past as well as offer a glimpse into future editions.
Viewable in the dyslexic option.
