Today we had a guest lecture Ione Gamble. Gamble is the founder of polyester magazine, an online publication as well as a hardcopy zine that is released every few months. Polyester also has a podcast section that accompanies the release of the next publication. Polyester magazine is a publication is a politically charged zine that expresses themes such as; support for the arts, body confidence and self love. Gamble created Polyester during her second year of university. Polyester now has a huge following with over 900,000 readers. Ione studied fashion journalism at university, so it was a natural step to move into the media business. The magazine does not use models on shoot days. The subjects Polyester uses are often scouted on social media. Ione explained that the magazine likes to show realness, and by using someone not from a modelling background makes for a more exciting shoot.

She quotes “people from a non modelling background are so much more excited and chatty on shoot days. They are much more involved in the shooting proses than a model would be. They really let the photograph know what their boundaries are and let us known what they are comfortable with” Gamble’s point about not using model made a lot of sense. The publication likes to promote body confidence in the right way, not necessarily exploiting  the model but allowing them to feel confutable on the shoot, to convey the right message to readers.

The layout however was thing thing that drew me to the magazine the most. Every page looks as though it could be a poster on a bedroom wall. The bright, bold and contrasting colours bring out every detail of the pages. This inattentive design made me really consider the importance of layout and colour schemes. The combination of image, text and illustration, emphasises the appearance on each page. Looking through the zines Ione brought in, made me consider what makes a layout effective. It made me consider what other publications I find appealing and perhaps would take inspiration for my own work. Seeing these zines has made me think about the way I want to layout my work whether that be an online publication or printed magazine.