OUGD601 RESEARCH INTO CASE STUDY 1

WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATE OF MAGAZINES AND WILL THEY SURVIVE THE DIGITAL ERA?

I began researching into my topic by sourcing lots of books from the library and understanding my topic. I wanted to find a magazine that demonstrated the whole life cycle of a piece of editorials rise and fall due to the digital era. This case study would prove a point in demonstrating that perhaps print is in fact dead or on its decline due to the digital age we live in. In retaliation to this I will show another side to that argument which is in fact that print is fighting back via developing its matter to create something new and more engaging.

To prove my first point in this case study, I began reading the book (Shaughnessy. A, 2008, Mute Magazine Graphic Desgin, London, Eight Books Limited) This read gives you an insight to the life of Mute Magazine between 1994 and 2008. The rapid rise and decline of this magazine is a perfect example of the digital era consuming our beloved printed matter. The summary of the book is that Mute started off creating their magazine as a retaliation to all the other magazines at the time by designing it on a format that had never been used for a magazine before. This gained lots of interest into the magazine and was a great success. Over time, the digital age effected the format of the magazine and it developed slowly over time into a more mainstream format, losing readers and buyers. After further research into the magazine after the year of 2008, I discovered that it became too expensive the make and they were not receiving enough funding or donations from their viewers. This soon lead the magazine to became a coffee table mag and then later on cancelling their print run entirely and turning fully digital. Here's a link to their current website where they still publish today. https://www.metamute.org/. In some senses they have turned full circle given the fact that their website uses the same grid system as their original issue in 1994.

On the other side of this argument, a lot of magazines today have developed the way they are being designed and considered to create new ways to read and fresh topics to discover. They have done this by creating new formats to print on, stock to use, topics to discuss and more importantly, developing their genre to suit a new generation of readers. This is something I'll be researching specifically to find out how some of these topics are changing to become more suitable for readers of the next generation. I've been reading content from some of the magazines exercising  this concept, such as Put an Egg on it, Carl's Cars and Frankie. They have all taken original topics and genres such as fashion, car and food magazines then pushed the meaning of the genre, really exploring what they stand for. This has lead to creating new topics and opening the minds to readers who would have never previously picked up a magazine. This has combated digital readers by publishing content not previously aired on digital platforms, meaning that the only way you'd have access to this is by purchasing their magazines.