Communication Studio: Grid Structure Analysis

The first assignment in our Communication Studio mini was to analyse the redesign of the business publication Fast Company. None of us had ever heard of Fast Company before, and had no idea what to expect when we conducted our initial research. We split ourselves into two groups, with Francis and I looking at the print version of Fast Company, and Elena and Catherine looking at the web version.

I was definitely pleasantly surprised when I flipped through one of their print issues for the first time. The publication had a bright, editorial feel, a cohesive color scheme and heavily featured big, beautiful illustrations. Fast Company we definitely not your typical business magazine.

Our research notes mostly focused on looking at the company’s history, audience, and brand identity. We looked at articles written on the website about the company’s redesign to gain a better understanding of the message Fast Company wanted to communicate with their new visual/brand identity.

Initial Research Notes

After consolidating all our notes, we agreed on a few takeaways that would be important to mention in our final presentation.

We wanted to focus on the idea that Fast Company isn’t your typical business magazine. It attempts to break away from the traditionally masculine image associated with the business sector by favouring a more progressive, editorial look, with an emphasis on bold photography and illustrations. A keyword that stood out to me as I was reading about the company’s redesign was gender neutral. The company’s gender ratio among its readers and employees is a near even split, which is rare for a business magazine.

Grid System Analysis

After discussing these big ideas, we each went off on our own to analyse the grid structure on both the web and print. Fortunately for print team, Francis found actual files of one of Fast Company’s print issues, which were a huge improvement from the scans that Vicki had given us, making it easier to stitch each page together to perform a more accurate grid analysis. I played around with the split into grid tool on illustrator until I found the right gutter and column size for the grid layout.

I initially thought that fast company used a simple 6 column grid structure, as it was the layout that fit with the first spread I analysed. However, I quickly realised after analysing the second spread that this wasn’t true.

Fast Company actually uses a 12-column grid layout. After doing a bit more reading on grid systems, I learned that this was actually a very common column structure to use in print publications. In most of Fast Company’s spreads, the adhere pretty strictly to the grid system. In this spread, however, I noticed that the grid was broken to accomodate the free form illustration. I think this will be a very interesting point to discuss in the presentation.

In addition to the grid layouts, I also did some extra research into the company’s use of colour. I went through every page in the magazine and pulled out colours that were prominently featured in every page.

Making the Presentation

We had been putting off deciding on a colour theme for the presentation for a while. In class, Vicki told us not to try too hard to emulate or overpower the visual aesthetics of the company we were studying. This was hard to do with fast company because pastels colour schemes are so easy to overpower. In the end, we chose our accent colour to be a deep green. We didn’t really agree on the colour as a team because we were so indecisive. In the end, it just took one person to bite the bullet and decide on a colour palette for the rest of us. I definitely thought it was an odd colour choice but it’s not something I regret.

We also divided our content into 4 categories: Preface (Background information), Stylistic Elements, Macro, and Micro. In the spirit of what we were learning in class, we also decided to use the grid when making our presentation to make a more visually cohesive look.

This was our first run of how we wanted the content to be organised. We wanted to mainly focus how Fast Company’s usage of the grid helped them communicate their brand identity and company values. We divided the grid analysis into the use of text and imagery within the grid.

Because I had already done most of my grid analysis beforehand, the work I had left to was was mainly the Macro view of the print structure. I had been procrastinating doing this for a while because it involves me thumbnailing out the 100-page magazine.

I found the final result to be pretty interesting- I noticed that there was a very clear rhythm and pacing in Fast Company’s overall print structure. The Issue’s feature articles were mostly placed in the middle, and full page ads were placed towards the beginning and end. The consecutive pages of full text at the end of the issue were the continuation of the interviews from one of the feature articles, which was too long to include in the middle.

Presentation Part 2

After meeting with my group, we decided that the presentation wasn’t going in the right direction. The big issue was that we were too focused on the grid, which didn’t leave room for analysis of other things. I felt this becoming a problem as I was working on my analysis of the grid. While Fast Company’s 6-column grid is an important vessel for them to communicate their brand identity, I felt that I was pulling at strings trying to connect all my ideas to the grid. At the end of the day, the grid is simply a system for a designer to organise their content. It’s about what they choose to do with it which makes their creativity shine through.

This is the new presentation plan that we came up with. It actually ended up cutting down the work I had to do, as we were focusing less on the grid and strengthening our analysis of the its stylistic and graphical elements. While we had plenty of work left to do together as a team, the last portion of my individual work was to finish up my macro analysis of the print issue.

Crit day

Takeaways from Crit (We met with Jaclyn outside of class time, and got feedback from Jaclyn and the National Geographic group on Tuesday)

• Our presentation is currently 2 minutes over time. We need to spend time cutting down our script.
• Our analysis of the grid is very robust, but might be taking up too much time. This is a good place for us to start cutting down things.
• Although our idea of connecting our analysis to three different adjectives were good, some people weren’t sold on the Gender-Neutral aspect when it came to the font analysis.
• For the macro view, adding the actual images of each spread before the thumbnails would help give the audience more contextual information.

Vicki’s Feedback (I wasn’t able to attend the meeting with Vicki as I was in a class. However, these were the points that my team relayed back to me.

• Font might be too big (green text boxes)
• We should be emphasising the company’s progressiveness more
• It would be good to have a slide after the three adjectives to show demographics and statistics about Fast Company’s audience.
• For colours, might be interesting to look into if colour on print vs web is affected by readership demographic changing by medium.

Most of the feedback we got from Vicki, Jaclyn, and the NatGeo team had to do with script adjustments. For the actual presentation, I went back to make some minor stylistic adjustments and added some more extra details into my Macro view slide.

I went through and screenshotted every page in the magazine and placed it before my thumbnail analysis. This honestly took FOREVER but I’m really happy with how it turned out and it really is the cherry on top to the Macro view.

After we finally polished up all our slides and transitions, we spent the rest of Wednesday practicing our dry runs and cutting down the script.

Day of Presentations

It was really interesting to see the different approaches everyone took in their presentations. Some groups took a similar approach to us by using adjectives to aid their analysis, while some groups focused on one big idea that they tried to reiterate throughout the presentation. I was also really impressed by everyone’s use of transitions. We definitely got a bit carried away with some of ours, but having never really used transitions before, I’ve definitely had a newfound appreciation of transitions as a new tool to aid with legibility and communication in presentations. In particular, I really enjoyed how the Atlantic’s group presented their grid structure by going through step by step how they gridded out the columns and gutters, and how these decisions aided in their understanding of the publication.

Even though I went into presentation feeling confident about our work as a team, seeing everyone’s presentations made me realised where I fell short. I really enjoyed how the NatGeo team used multiple examples to show the company’s use of imagery in the print publications and wish I had also done that for my print examples.

Overall, I’m really happy with how our presentation turned out. Even though there’s always room for improvement, I’m satisfied with how we worked together as a team. This project really helped me gain a better understanding and appreciation of the grid system, which is, at the end of the day, the best thing that I could’ve gained from this assignment