My Fake Harley Magazine
For this project I wanted to explore and get a more basic understanding for the Mag+ and Designd tools. I know that for a topic I wanted to pick something that has a lot of resources. I picked up motorcycle riding in the last couple years and I’m in the process of restoring a bike. I thought the Harley-Davidson brand would be some fun to play with, and decided to create just a small publication with the images, videos, and other bits of media I could find on the web.As it turns out, there is a plethora of Harley content floating around out there.
I started out with an outline of all of the information I wanted to include and a breakdown of what pages/verticals would include certain content. I decided to define my audience as pretty broad, anyone who has an interest in motorcycles or who is curious about Harley’s history. I stated in, my overview:
“This publication is not just for people who ride Harleys, or those who ride motorcycles at all. The focus is less on the mechanics or parts of the machine, but more on the history of the company, vintage pictures, articles, and models of a variety of bikes. This may include those who ride motorcycles, anyone interested in the history of cars and motorcycles, and those who may be looking to learn how to ride.”
I also decided to create a statement that I could refer back to if I was feeling stuck with the goal of my publication. I knew that I wanted to make something that was less focused on the mechanical side of motorcycles and more so on the history and culture of a particular motorcycle manufacturer. I wanted to include: timelines, information about individual models, and a more general listing of motorcycle recommendations for different levels of experience.
I then broke down what specifically I wanted to cover on each vertical. I decided that I would start out with an “Early Life” page that just had some basic history on the company, and a little information about the founders.
This page I felt was almost the most difficult because the compant was founded in 1903, and finding any decent quality pictures or any sort of media, even old newspaper articles was pretty difficult. I found the best images I could and ended up making a little collage out of those. The page was pretty simple because of this, but I still felt that it conveyed the message I was trying to get across to the viewer. The text here is also taken from the Wikipedia and the official Harley Davidson page. Luckily Harley has their own profile on Unsplash.com and had a huge gallery of high quality images that worked perfectly for the B layer backgrounds on almost all 10 of my verticals.
The second page I wanted to highlight here was the third page which was the “Diagram” page. I first had a PNG image of a motorcycle displayed here and tried to overlay some pop ups of different parts of a bike. This for some reason didn’t seem to work. I came across this issue again in my timeline pages where things wouldn’t seem to show up correctly over PNG images. However for my Diagram page I was able to create a little Hype file that allows for the user to click on the blue highlighted buttons and it displays parts of the bike. I felt it was a more memorable and interactive way to get the general understanding of how a motorcycle functions.
A few other pages I wanted to cover that I felt helped make the publication more interactive and immersive were the timeline pages. They were fully an interactive piece, and though there probably could have been even more interactive ways to pull this off I wanted to stick with the safe option in Mag+ and use the pop up feature. I split the timeline from a 1900s to1950s section and then a 1960s to present. If the user clicks on a major date (highlighted with orange text) it will then pull up a little fact or memorable moment from that time. I included some other little PNG images to fill up the space around the timeline and all of the images relate to the date and pop up text.
Overall this project was pretty fun and useful for me personally to gain a greater understanding of Mag+. I know where most of its limitations and strengths are, and I was really happy to get even something as simple as that Hype HTML working in there. My favorite and I think most composed page, even though it is the smallest in content, was the final vertical I did on the new LiveWire all electric bike Harley has just started producing. It comes with a hefty price tag, but I decided not to highlight that aspect on any of the bikes I showed, I felt that it was too much of a catalogue or ad if I were to do this. The LiveWire page was clean and tidy, I found several great images that all had the same color palette and they were high quality. It only has a short paragraph or two of information, but I just felt that it was a nice display of this motorcycle at a quick glance, which is exactly what I was shooting for with my original intention for the project; less on the specifics or the complexities of riding, and more on the “coolness” of the machine.
