Digital News: Ideas Lab Meeting

To continue the development of our idea, our group sat down for a second time to discuss the next steps.

IDEAS LAB MEETING

To being the meeting I showed the group the website I had set up. This would help give everyone an idea of the current branding. I will talk more about the design of the website in another post, however I will talk about the header design in this one.

HEADER DESIGN

Header design

Above is the current design for the header on the website. After the group saw it, they agreed I should adapt it, and use the same graphics for the opening titles, instead of using the designs from the summer project. I agreed as I felt this new design fit the brand, and our target audience more. The header features four graphics:

• Two arrow based graphics- To represent how we aim to direct you to the news we think you ought to know.
• A microphone- To represent how we want to give students a voice.
• A light- To represent how we want to shine a light on the stories we think students care about.

Overall the theme of the header shows how we want to be a stage for all things student. After looking through the website, the group agreed it was right for our brand, and that our initial colour choices (orange and purple) we also right for our brand.

RESEARCH

Next we spoke about the research everyone had carried out since the last meeting. Becca and Nisserin spoke about a student in our first year who they discovered was a youtuber. Her name is Katie Joslin, and she has about 6,000 subscribers, which isn't a lot compared to bigger youtubers, but it was enough for us. As a group we decided that we should try and get her as a contributor for our main story about viral videos.

Ida told us about some research shad had carried out. She looked at the reaction to the release of the news iPhone 7. She also looked into app testing as another thing we could carry out on our show, to help students decide which apps they should be using, especially if they will aid their studies. As well as this, Ida developed 'Meme of the Day', and two social media related topics 'Insta-scoop' and 'Snap-Yak'.

Finally we spoke about another first year we thought we could get involved, called George. We watched his summer project and spotted that he was quite good in front of the camera. He had a really good personality, and so we thought he'd be great for our show. Next we will look into getting him involved.

LOGO DESIGNS

One of the most important parts of our brand is the logo. We need something that is instantly recognisable, like the big golden M of McDonalds. After some discussion, we thought it would be great if we could have a Yak with a graduation cap on as our logo. I put together a quick preview of the sort of thing we would like on Photoshop.

Test logo

Ida told us about a friend she had who was a graphic designer. After looking at some of her work online, we decided that it would be great if we could hire her and get her to design our logo. Ida will look into this. To see here work, click here.

25 WORD PITCH

Ida mentioned that it would be a good idea if we worked on a 25 word pitch to help us explain our idea to others. If we came up with one, we could also put it on our website in the 'about us' section.

To read the pitch we came up with, click here.

Finally we discussed what work needed to be carried out next:

• Ida- Talk to Katie about being involved
• Josh- Work on graphic design
• Becca- Start working on the script
• Nisserin- Look into the viral video story. What makes something viral?

Overall this was a very good meeting, and after much discussion, we are now very happy and confident with our final idea.

 Credit: Ida Frank