To start, I would just like to say that the collaborative process of building this magazine has certainly been a joy, being able to work with all of our authors to continue improving our own works as well as create something entirely our own was a great experience and we would all be eager to do so again. I would say we are quite lucky, as all of our work is centered around some common themes of experiences through modern life that affect our human condition both mentally and physically, hence our title The Head and the Heart. I found that one of the most interesting things regarding the issues we are bringing to the table is the fact that each one of us have experiences with these issues from our own lives. It gave us confidence from the start to know that these issues weren’t something that we just pulled out of nowhere, but actually had a measure of deliberation and background knowledge involved before we even took this class.
Saying we are passionate about our issues is an understatement, if we were not as invested before this then we definitely are now. As now we all have seen the effects of our topics from a variety of perspectives, through interviews, field research and our own life experience; We are all very familiar with the issues we are writing about, and we create our pieces with a sense of advocacy because of this familiarity. We are not aiming to change minds, we are simply aiming to inform and bring new perspectives to our readers that they very well may have never thought of before, through a variety of mediums from videos and infographics to essays and podcasts. I am personally very grateful that we were able to revise and collaborate as a team. We certainly didn’t pull any punches when giving feedback to each other's work, as our Visual Editor Kelly Larson said, “For me I had the luxury that our group gave the brutal blunt honesty, this helped my pieces be edited to become the best possible. The things I didn’t see from the outside perspective. With the honesty from my group I believe we all were able to revise and adapt our pieces for all audiences to accept and understand our work, even though they are very different topics.” This is something that we did very well, with many collaborative efforts a team is afraid of saying what they really think because of fear of backlash or other vindictive behavior. But not here, we laid it all out on the table and we were mature enough as individuals to work with the feedback and develop something even better than expected. It’s rare to get this kind of feedback from a college group and I hope to receive the same in the future. This also helped us adapt our purpose of the pieces and how it will relate to the reader, by having us all give our opinions it developed our work into a much more well rounded and easily digested piece. We want our messages to reach as many people as possible, and this helped us tailor our pieces for this purpose. Our revision process even helped me work in a medium that I purposely avoided previously, our Writing Editor Michelle West had an awesome infographic that she created and shared with our group for critique. After seeing how effective this was at translating her Information Effect piece I could not help but create one of my own, even though I had no experience doing so in the past. Analyzing our groups work helped me come out of my own comfortable, creative-shell and take a leap with something I was completely inexperienced with. I know I certainly would not have if it wasn’t for her sharing her own work, as I had different plans for what I was going to adapt previously. We aimed to explore our issues through a variety of mediums and passages. This is why we each decided to include adapted versions of two of our Notebook assignments, rather then adapt one of our larger pieces. This gave each of us both a measure of creative freedom when it came to what was included in our magazine, as well as more variety with the articles in our magazine. We chose to do so because we believe it reflects what a magazine is like more accurately. A magazine isn’t just three long pieces of work one after another, a magazine has this variety in length and medium, so we wanted to break up the pacing much akin to magazines, with several headlining pieces broken up by several smaller ones. As a group we all came prepared with which larger pieces we wanted to include in the magazine, but had to pick and choose from the Notebook pieces for adaptation. We individually decided which of our notebook pieces were the strongest/best for adaptation and just ran with it. Our group decided that the magazine style we liked most was the Uncube architecture design. We loved the fast and fluid way that magazine navigated and we used this as an inspiration for our current magazine. Uncube had a symmetrical, almost minimalist look that was very neat, tidy and fluid. Though we are no web designers, we did our absolute best to show this on our Weebly. Big props to Kelly Larson, our Visual Editor, he took the ball and ran with it, giving us an awesome, tidy template to add our work to. It was just what we had in mind. With fluidity in mind, I wanted to keep our works cited page outside of the actual space where our work was. So Kelly created a separate page for this to maintain the clean look. Here we will organize our page by Author, then by piece itself. I just didn't want our work to get bogged down by MLA citations. They look clunky to me.
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