E-Zine examples

The Window on my World SPB requires an e-zine to be produced. But what, exactly, is an e-zine and what does it look like?

Interesting question actually, because it’s not necessarily as clear-cut as I think the examiners presume. Lots of sources seem to suggest an e-zine can be a bulk e-mail, presumably with embedded links and so on. But I think they’re probably talking about a mini-website. So let’s go with that as an idea.

Examples then. Tricky to find to be honest. Here’s some that are worth looking at in my opinion:

Sewpunk – I quite like the look of this – a sort of scrapbook approach that is Quite Cool in itself. The text is horrible mind you. It’s related to the Art E-zine – I think there’s lot of potential to use an interesting image map approach to do this sort of thing. Image maps are easy to do once you know how

London Broncos E-Zine – this is quite an easy look to use – it’s very blocky and that’s simple to do on the web. I like the big picture and the three links down the right hand side. A nice, simple approach that’s easy enough to use

Screenshot of the London Broncos E-Zine signup page

Kireei Magazine - a much more complex technique, but it gives you an idea that companies do produce things that look like magazines on the web. Some companies use this sort of approach for their catalogues (Ikea for example). You can certainly get some layout ideas from this

Touchbase – a magazine produced by the UK Department for Works and Pensions (i.e. the government). It’s not exactly funky looking, but if you open one of the magazines you can see how you can move around from page to page using hyperlinks. If you were producing a real magazine with many pages then I’d say this is the look to aim for – but you’re not…

The key is that the e-zine the SPB wants has:

• a cover page (with an animated banner and an embedded audio file in it)
• a contents page (with links to the movie and information page)
• an information page (with stuff about your topic on it)
• a movie (which I think can be embedded in a page – possibly even in the contents page)

Which isn’t actually all that much stuff.

E-zines are an odd thing these days to be honest. All a bit behind the times in terms of web design – you’d think you’d just use a blog and embed you tube videos these days. Wouldn’t you?

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