This was the main part of my graduation project at the art academy. The project was based around a magazine called 'I like' (in combination with a name of a person). The concept of the magazine was that each issue would be about a different creative person (in the widest meaning of the word creative), picked by the central person of the previous issue. Each issue, being a sort of time document, would be divided into different sections (i am / point of view (they got a disposable camera from me) / locations / my works / inspiration / people / art and design / books and other kinds of print / live performances / films / sound and music / second skin / things that fit nowhere else section / the next issue / ps ) which contained material provided by the 'main character' of the issue. If they didn't want to add anything in a certain section, the page would be left blank. Each issue would have the same format (the size of the magazine was set, but the amount of pages was completely in the hands of the main character each time), the typography on the cover and the label on the side were also set and so were the 15 sections. This to have a sort of minor identity for the magazine itself.
I picked my friend Karin den Dekker, a Dutch Photographer, as the main character for the first issue. And she picked Nishiko, a Japanese Fine Artist living in Holland for the second issue.
There was total freedom in the way the main character would interpret the titles of the given sections. So Karin gave me boxes filled with material like books, letters, photographs, little drawings objects, shoes and many other things. While Nishiko gave me hardly anything. It was very interesting as Karin's issue became very visual and filled with interesting things, she was interested in at that moment, while Nishiko's issue became very minimal. She gave me just a handful of things like little single lines of text. And as for her portfolio she didn't want to show it, so I did design the pages of her portfolio for the 'my works' section and printed them, but then glued those pages together. Every design solution had been carefully discussed with the main character of an issue.
It was a very interesting project to me as during my time at the academy I never really worked with material from other people (I was used to create my own images all the time) and this way I was forcing myself just to work with material from other people. It still involved a lot of designing, as I had to order everything, arrange everything and take hundreds of pictures and work with them on the computer, put everything together and make it look as much as possible like the person it's was about.
In between this text you can see some images from the first issue about Karin (I will add some pictures from Nishiko's issue when I get back to Holland). Most pages in her issue where in black and white and some in colour as she was going through a big change in her life at that moment. She was interested in many things at that point but not everything was so important to her then, so the colour represented the things which where important to her in the present and the black and white things where more on the background at that moment.
Now I am writing this text I have to say that the concept is still very interesting to me, so I might continue with it in the future, perhaps in a slightly different way.
