Edge Website Prototype

In moving ahead in the process of getting Edge magazine off the ground, Nathan Sharratt and I took some time to develop a prototype using sites.gsu.

After much consideration, and thanks to Nathan’s artist’s eye, we decided to try out the theme called Hueman – a cute portmanteau smashing together color and people. The theme has a lot of affordances with menu bars, sidebars can be moved (for example), and with scrolling posts. It favors media and can be formatted in several ways that may end up working out really well for what Edge becomes.

One of our hopes is to feature student designed banner images containing their interpretations of our project name, ‘Edge.’ Below, you can see a banner that Nathan created in just a few moments. The name of the magazine is prominent, with a cute tagline I invented on the fly. The prominent design can be replaced easily with a student designed banner.

Edge-Banner-prototype

What’s more, we plan to archive all featured student images in an archive so they are searchable by students and future employers that may wish to see what students have produced. Further, we can replace and move around any of the menus you see in the image above. We can alter the colors, and re-arrange the sidebars.

There is only a small portion of the sidebars visible in the image above, but if you look below, you will see lower down on the same page, which features both left and right sidebars (one with a blue header, and one with a green header), and the post scroller.

front-page-scroll-tester

Nearly every aspect of these sidebars can be altered, including content, color, and position. But what is exciting to me, is the scroller in the middle, which is currently featuring a video. Nathan pulled a video from an art installation he did and put it up on the Edge site, just to see how it would look. The scroller displays a thumbnail, and can be played right in-site. It also features text area below, and can be made to pop-out. We can insert still images, audio, video, and so on. But we did find that if there is no featured image, this area remains ‘blank,’ which you will see if you go to the website in the next week or so: sites.gsu.edu/edge.

One of the pages I have worked on from the beginning is the missions statement page. It turns out that writing a missions statement is very tricky. Word choice matters VERY much because our audience will be quite diverse, and I need to make sure  our mission statement points only to potentially positive missions. Below is the top part of the missions statement.

Mission-statement-page

You can see the image that I have chosen as a placement image. Ideally, I will feature something that takes place on GSU campus, but I haven’t yet come up with the right idea that will portray ‘mission statement for our magazine.’ Below the image, you can see the beginning of the mission statement. And to the left, you can see that on this page, we experimented with a single sidebar, and chose what goes on it. For now, we are using the term ‘baskets’ instead of categories, because we use that word a lot in meetings, and I thought it would make some of us giggle.

Featuring particular posts profiles on Edge has also been a popular topic in meetings, so Nathan and I decided to create a test profile, which can be navigated to from the front page (if you look above to the second image). Below, you can see that Nathan created his own profile as a test piece.

Profile Test

The page is a static page and can be archived, categorized, and featured on the front page, as needed. As you can see, we have moved the menu options around in the sidebar, which demonstrates all the menu options available in the theme without having to hack it.

Overall, we’re pretty excited to see our first project prototypes go up on the site. We plan to build one of each medium that the theme allows, and try to do a few cross-media pieces to, to show what the website might be like when it officially launches next Fall.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more developments on Edge and feel free to leave comments below with suggestions, problems, or thoughts.

 

Edge Magazine in Development

Maybe you’ve heard the buzz, and maybe you haven’t:

Edge Magazine is coming to Georgia State University next Fall.

What is Edge Magazine?

Edge is an undergraduate project and research magazine/journal hybrid. It will be a fully online publication that encourages interesting multimedia presentations of excellent undergraduate work done in and out of class.

Why Edge?

You may have heard that GSU already has an undergraduate research journal called Discovery.

Discovery Journal Banner

Discovery features only Honors student work and is a much more traditional approach to research that Edge intends to be. We hope to be a more interactive take on the undergraduate research journal.

 

Edge is not DiscoveryEdge is its own entity – it’s own experiment. Edge is Edge.

What’s up with the name? 

We chose the name Edge for several reasons:

  • In an attempt to make sure we are, in fact, a little ‘edgy’ in terms of what a journal could be, Edge seemed like the logical choice for a name.
  • We want to be on the cutting edge of what a research journal can be.
  • Sometimes, when we come to the edge of something, a cliff, an idea, a sidewalk, it seems that nothing further can be done. We want to be that ‘further’. We want to do what research journals have not yet done. We want to go there. Over that edge.
Taken from http://fiqixirsi.com/most-beautiful-landscape-photos-of-norway/

Taken from http://fiqixirsi.com/most-beautiful-landscape-photos-of-norway/

Who is our audience? 

Edge will be outward facing, so that anyone with an internet connection may experience it. It will not be kept behind a paywall. It will not be limited to GSU students’ eyes only. If you contribute to Edge, your parents, your friends, your uncle Jack in Sarasota will have access to your work.

This means our audience will be anyone who is interested in experiencing the amazing work that is coming out of Georgia State University today. These are people who are interested in knowing what is happening at GSU. They are people who are interested in experiment, innovation, and ideas.

What is the vision?

There is no link to Edge as I write this entry today. This is because we are still in vision mode. I have drawn up plans for the amount of labor we will eventually need, and plans for the editorial process.

We are in the stage where we get to build the ideal. And that ideal is currently to create a multimedia journal/magazine hybrid that is accessible and fun for the audience to read, while maintaining a cutting-edge format where authors may attempt to showcase their research and project work in ways that research journals haven’t ever before.

You might see multi-layered work with lots of hyperlinks and videos. Or you might see text with audio spliced in and an image or two. Or you may see something unexpected that I can’t envision enough to explain yet.

What’s next?

We are excited about the possibilities of this project and are attempting to set the groundwork for an exciting launch during the next school year. In the meantime, we need to construct an infrastructure capable of maintaining a website that is actually on the edge of content that comes from a research university and showcases the work that undergraduates are capable of.

At the moment, we’re cobbling together ideas from a bunch of brains that are as capable as they are brilliant, in order to launch the skeleton of a website which will be both malleable and  fluid in its ability to be molded to fit the content we receive.

We are preparing with images, banners, video capability, lots of other great art, and some really wonderful content that will hopefully be interesting and surprising.

Birch_Ave_Mural

Here is one of the images I captured for the image archive to enhance content with provoking images.

 

As we come up with a logo, a basic site, and more solid visions, I will be updating you here, hopefully with more images. Stay tuned.