HD Magazine is a cross-disciplinary initiative, seeking to bring together students from the fields of Journalism and Graphic Design (from 1st year through to 4th year). Its creation allows students to share knowledge and skills, showcase their work and contribute to establishing a sense of community within the School of Communications and Arts (SCA) at Edith Cowan University (ECU). HD Magazine is bi-annually published (four issues to date), with future stages of development including online publication and collaboration with students from interactive media development and creative writing.
From a design perspective, HD Magazine is also an investigation into visual literacy, in particular the relationship between illustrative, reductive techniques (iterative vs exaggerative) and the text within a news story. Graphic work on the magazine explores new ways of visualising journalism, which traditionally relies on photography for its pictorial output. This is done through research models investigating the affect of caricature and iterative pictorial reduction.
This collaborative, cross-disciplinary project has facilitated an assessable authentic workplace experience across SCA, in line with the ECU Graduate attribute policy and curriculum framework. It is also an examination of the dynamics of cross-disciplinary teams working on multimodal output. The process of researching, writing and compiling the articles into a magazine provides insight into how publications grow from early ideas to printed pages.