Term 2 brings even more excitement. And work!

Fashion Media Lab is definately one of my favourite courses - not that others are not. But it gets us working on very exciting projects. First term I had an amazing experience of creating fashion films, this term we continue by building up websites. I have worked as an EIC on one website before, so the web talk was a bit familiar to me, but the htmls and all the programming always seemed so mysterious. And now we are learning that - things I never imagined I could do!

my very, very first html

For our Media Lab class we are working on a very exciting project - building up a website for an up-and-coming designer. We have already started collaborating with the designer, it seems quite good and promising. And we will even be making a film to present his new collection, which will be showed at LFW in February. I am in the group with Zahra, Janna and Mariana CP and we couldn't be more excited about that. Roles are clear in our group already, me and Mariana are doing the art direction of the website - I am very happy as that was exactly my goal. Today we have spent a couple of hours building up the ideas of how the website should look and function. It's going quite well, we might have a nice work in the end.
So, as you can see, I am very happy and very excited. There is just one thing - I am sure that Peter could teach us a lot and it would be fantastic and if he could share his experience and knowledge with us more. And so far all that we are doing is juts presenting our work in progress to him and everyone else in the class. I know it is important, but... Well, hopefully it is yet to come and we will hear Peter talking more often.
But I just had a panick attack tonight, as I realised how much we have to do for all the courses in a very short period of time. The term is ending in less than a month. And we have A LOT MORE than just a lot of work to do. I'm scared!
And still - I am already very sad that this course is going to end really soon. I already want to do it again.

Talking about the future

My essay is done now and I have done quite a lot of research, reading in order to write it. I absolutely enjoyed the process and the topic of niche magazines and "Visionaire" was something that interests me very, very much. Going to LCF library and checking out old "Visionaire" issues was an amazing experience. I know my essay could have been better, if I would have managed to get a personal interview with Cecilia and that was the plan at first. I am very happy she agreed to answer my questions, but due to the holiday period I did not manage to get the answers to my questions on time. Still, in the period of twenty years, they have talked quite a lot about the publication, so it was only a question of me digging well enough to find all this information.
As this was the Fashion Futures course, I believe (and reading the interviews with magazine editors, I notice I am not the only one) that for the magazines to survive in the digital era there is only one way - to offer something exclusive, something that can not be found online, an experience. That is why I am so drawn to these artisanal niche magazines - they bring magazine publishing to art and to the future. I particularly loved the title of the book about "Visionaire", it is called "Dreaming in print: a decade of "Visionaire". I think that is what these people are doing: dreaming in print. And I find it very beautiful. It will be interesting to see how the magazines are going to evolve and maybe in 50 years for our kids will be hard to believe that those interesting objects are something that used to be plain printed paper magazines.
We will see.

An image from Visionaire #59 FAIRYTALE