Digital Eternity: Case Study

Digital Eternity is about the overlap of digital and physical technologies, centred around an annual editorial magazine, tackling topics of changing technology and the preservation of media.

The first issue discusses the concept of lost media. This is a phenomenon where pieces of media; from music, literature, film, or video games go missing, typically meaning there are no known complete copies of it available to the public. Titled, Media Lost/Media Found, it discusses cases of media that has been lost over time; explaining how it was retrieved and the process of tracking its whereabouts. In addition, it delves into ongoing cases of lost media. This magazine issue is accompanied by promotional missing posters, each about media that is currently missing. These encourage the readers to call the hotline or visit the website to report any information they may have.

Physical media is extremely important to me. I have shelves overfilled with beloved albums, films, books, magazines, and comics in my home. Though I collect for the love of print and design, I often find myself worrying about a day when a piece of media that I love dearly becomes inaccessible without a physical copy. Lost media has been at the forefront of my mind, especially in recent times as physical media sales fall in favour of online subscription services. The name Digital Eternity is a double entendre; I do promote the preservation of physical media in digital means, but the internet is not forever, and it is just as important to keep and cherish physical copies of the things you love.

The Problem

When a piece of media, such as a book, film, music, television show, or video game is not properly archived or censored purposefully it has a risk of going missing completely. This is referred to as “lost media.” Though most current cases of lost media pre-date the modern internet, as physical media fades out of the public conscience in favour of streaming services and digital downloads. Through these practices, we risk losing publically accessible copies of these pieces of media if ever taken down from their host sites. Organizations like The Internet Archive and The Uncensored Library work towards preserving endangered or inaccessible works, publishing them to the public for free.

Though most of these instances occur accidentally, being lost to time, destructive tragedies or just due to poor preservation, many cases are lost on purpose due to censorship. Often times, these long-lost media are found in the most unlikely of places. From salt mines, to storage units, years-long media hunts have been retrieved in places least expected. Spreading awareness and encouraging people to share any information they may know about missing pieces of media could trigger the retrieval of a piece of culture long-lost to time.

The primary target audience for Digital Eternity are young adults interested in internet history and pop culture. Utilizing recognizable figures and imagery part of lost media cases,—as Michael Jackson, The Backyards, and The Flintstones— targets these adults directly, capturing their attention and drawing them to the project through familiarity. Spreading awareness and educating young adults on the importance of preserving media is the main objective of the project. The secondary target audience is older adults who lived most of their life in landscape with physical media, like CDs, Vinyl LPs, Cassettes, and VHS’ who may happen to have missing pieces of media in their storage rooms. To achieve these goals,

I decided the best design solution for this problem was an editorial magazine and a poster series. The editorial magazine features short articles about interesting cases of lost media over time, utilizing colourful duo tone imagery and bitmap style typography and illustration to create nostalgia for early internet aesthetics. The poster series acts as wanted posters for pieces of media still being investigated, encouraging passersby to scan the QR code or call the hotline with any information they may have. By having two avenues of collecting information, a website and a hotline, it opens the opportunity to everyone to share new information regardless of technological hurdles.

Target Audience
& Strategy

Nameplate

For the nameplate of the magazine, I wanted something pixelated and blocky, leaning into the tech and early internet aesthetics, but still sleek and legible. Eterna PX is a bitmap typeface I created specifically for this project. After searching for the perfect pixel font to utilize in the visual identity practically everywhere (I even checked DaFont) nothing was connecting with me. Eventually I started making my own glyphs to create the nameplate, and loved the styling so much I wanted to extend it’s use throughout the magazine. I created the glyphs in Adobe Illustrator and imported them into FontForge to generate the font. This is utilized primarily in the nameplate of the magazine, the page numbers throughout the magazine, and the large text on the posters and post cards.

Colour Pallete

Colour was another difficult hurdle through the design process. Creating colour palettes is often something I struggle with, so I had started to design the magazine and it’s covers fully in black and white for the first half of the project. Finally I had the idea to use CMYK, the inks present in most printers as an additional link to physical media in my design, to be assigned to each of the four chapters. I was apprehensive to use CMYK at first, since I thought it was too easy of a choice for this project, so I tried to use it in unique ways, such as the duo tone image treatments and text embellishments.

How to properly pair colours, especially in the image treatment, was something I was refining right until the end. Playing with how the colours balance with each other while also maintaining a good level of contrast, both for accessibility and image legibility, while also making sure the colours do not get muddied by each other required a lot of test printing and experimenting, leading to this final system.

Icons

As an homage to Susan Kare’s illustrations for the 80s Macintosh operating systems, I bitmap illustrated these icons to be utilized throughout the magazine’s branding and promotion, and as article end marks throughout the magazine. These icons are inspired by analog pieces of media, such as CDs, VHS tapes, floppy discs, and cassettes, alongside a cursor to represen t the digital and internet end of the project. The selection of these specific mediums were influenced by the contents of the magazine’s articles and the type of media they discussed.

Textures

A Major pillar in the design of Digital Eternity was to emphasize the relationship between digital and analog media. To emphasize this, I utilized traditional print textures, such as halftones and dithers, to play into the print aspects of the topic, but altered and composed with digitally, reflecting the magazine’s topics of that crossroad of digital and physical media.

Photography

Photography was something I really enjoyed experimenting with in the layouts of the magazine, playing with the balance of full colour and duo tone images. I wanted to emulate the look of a scrapbook, overlaying images with different textures and looks creating more depth in the magazine at a textural level. I was very strict on how I used imagery throughout the magazine, only aligning the full colour images on the base to the grid system, and letting the more abstracted duo tone images overlayed on top to break that system.

Magazine Cover
& Cover Variations

The magazine cover was the element of the magazine I started first, and finished last. Thinking of a design to encompas this entire project as important as a magazine cover was extremely daunting, so rather than starting with it, I continued to work on it throughout the project and returned to finalize it at the end. The magazine cover is where I first started playing with the idea of overlaying elements on top of each other, inspiring the image structure carried throughout the magazine. I got the idea after getting frustrated after making 30+ variations of the magazine cover very early into the design process. I began to rip up the covers and gluing the pieces back together on top of each other. I narrowed down this process to four main elements; A duo tone image, a black and white image, the black backdrop, and a cursor. Mixing and matching these four elements in different ways allowing the nameplate, issue number and feature articles to float to where they fit best.

Closing Notes

This project was a challenge since day one.
The preservation of media was not the topic I took through the design research phase. Design research was extremely tough, probably the most difficult class I took throughout this program. Writing and hard research have never been easy for me, and it was harder when working through a topic that, in hindsight, wasn’t working. Initially, this project was going to be about typed emoticons—the idea of looking into the history of something typically overlooked really interested me—but there wasn’t enough history to dive into, at least for the vision I had for this project. After weeks of hitting brick walls with every assignment, I thought I just had to push through and trust the process, and I would figure it out.

Then at Week 13, I had a mental breakdown. Working late at night trying to meet the deadlines extended twice over, I began spiraling so hard that I got dizzy. I needed to take a step back to distract myself, so I opened YouTube. At the top of my recommendation tab sat a video essay about Me and My Friends, the lost TV pilot for The Backyardians. Then it clicked; Media Preservation. I felt that spark and grabbed my notebook, jotting down all the ideas that rushed through my mind, finally feeling excited about

my thesis again. I realized then, If I changed my topic, I’d have to restart the research project from scratch, a daunting topic considering how difficult the process was the first time. Disregarding my worries, I wrote out a pros and cons list and brought it into Blair Francey’s class that week. I pitched him the idea, and he told me to go for it. So I worked through the winter break to catch up on an entire semester’s worth of research, and I am so glad I did.

Bringing this project to Nicola Hamilton’s class was scary. Having completely restarted my research presentation over the break, I hadn’t had the reassurance that I was on the right track from peers or professors, which was a big exercise in trusting myself. I pitched the idea; an editorial magazine about cases of lost media with a poster series. At first, she was unsure of my choice of deliverables, suggesting that the topic lends itself better to a website, but I came back the following week with mood boards of my vision, and we quickly jumped on the same page. Finding the content of the magazine was the next major challenge; it turns out that there’s not much information on things that are missing! After weeks of research, I finally had a list of articles that I felt confident in, and from that point, it was

relatively smooth sailing! Week after week I’d bring in my project wanting to get more experimental and unconventional with its structure and aesthetic. I was set on the magazine being a yellowed and uncoated stock, inspired by an 80s copy of Ebony Magazine lent to me by Nicola, so finding a printer to accommodate that request was the next task. After shooting out a handful of emails, Moveable was the only print shop that could accommodate that request. Printing with moveable taught me so much about print production, and those trips I took down to liberty village to see every milestone of the project were a fun opportunity to see more of the city that I already miss dearly.
In the end, I am very happy with my project. If I could change anything about it, I wish I had been a little more experimental with the layout, but this feels like a project I could continue working on forever, so this is where it ends.

This project taught me patience and resilience, but above all it taught me that I am able to be confident in my decisions. Throughout the design process I was faced with many crossroads where I had to trust my instinct and my creative vision, and though it was scary, I’m happy to look back and say I have no regrets.

graphic designer