During my time at Future Publishing, I managed to arrange an interview with John Strike, who is the Deputy Art Editor of Xbox World 360 magazine. I felt like it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit about the magazines industry as well as furthering my own knowledge of the industry and the skills/equipment associated with it. It also meant ticking off another task for the Professional Studies module.
3rd of March 2011 - 10:15 - 11:00Name: John Strike
Occupation: Deputy Art Editor - Xbox World 360 magazine
How did you find yourself working for Future?
"I started out doing a 3 year degree in Graphic Design at the Cumbria institute of Arts. At the end of the course, we had an exhibition/gallery type thing to display work we had done. The work was seen by a contact from Future Publishing, who then recommended me to the Bath branch."
As a Deputy Art Editor, what sort of work do you do?
"I work in a team of designers and editors on the Xbox World 360 magazine, which is roughly 132 pages long. We aim to visually represent the content using assets and stories, liasing ideas with eachother and sending each page through a number of processes to be analyised by a number of different people. The Production editor runs through the content to make sure everything is relevant and that there are no spelling mistakes, accidents etc. A lot of the images in the magazines we use are supplied to us by the individual game companies for our usage. We can then tweak them and edit them so that they can be added appropriately in their respective positions in the magazine. The Xbox World 360 magazine is an unofficial magazine – which basically means that it holds a lot more personalised elements rather then the formal and by-the-book ways of the official magazines, like with Imagine Publishing, who are probably our biggest rivals at present. Each of our magazines has its own budget, and each magazine divides the budget out into the art and template side of things and the written work, editorial side of things. It takes us roughly 16-18 working days to create each issue of XBW 360 with teams of six working on them."
What skills are required to work in this sector of the industry?
"In this particular sector of the design world, it is important to have a good grip on the software InDesign, as it is the software we currently use to arrange the magazine page templates. It is also good to have proficiency with PhotoShop as we occasionally need to edit and manipulate certain aspects of an image or the design of the magazine. It’s nice to think that “experience counts for more than a degree” but in reality, you are more likely to be chosen if you have a degree. When I first became involved with Future, I only had knowledge with PhotoShop and Illustrator but the company trained me to use InDesign and it was a sort of baptism of fire when I first started out."
Do you enjoy working at Future? What are the positives and negatives?
"It’s great working with Future, they teach you the skills you need and they train you up for the workload. It’s not the most taxing of professions and you get to work in a very relaxed environment, meeting people from all over the world. The downside I suppose, for me, was that I had to move a long way from my home up north in order to work at the Bath branch. Often with this sort of work and many others in the design sector, there can be a lot of travelling involved, especially in the journalism side of things. Often you will be shipped off to review a certain event taking place on the other side of the country. The actual workload can get a bit frustrating after a while, as well. The templating system we use on the magazines is rather restricting in the way it can stop us being as creative as we’d like to be. Overall though, I don’t regret my being here and hope to keep my job for the meantime anyway."
"In this particular sector of the design world, it is important to have a good grip on the software InDesign, as it is the software we currently use to arrange the magazine page templates. It is also good to have proficiency with PhotoShop as we occasionally need to edit and manipulate certain aspects of an image or the design of the magazine. It’s nice to think that “experience counts for more than a degree” but in reality, you are more likely to be chosen if you have a degree. When I first became involved with Future, I only had knowledge with PhotoShop and Illustrator but the company trained me to use InDesign and it was a sort of baptism of fire when I first started out."
Do you enjoy working at Future? What are the positives and negatives?
"It’s great working with Future, they teach you the skills you need and they train you up for the workload. It’s not the most taxing of professions and you get to work in a very relaxed environment, meeting people from all over the world. The downside I suppose, for me, was that I had to move a long way from my home up north in order to work at the Bath branch. Often with this sort of work and many others in the design sector, there can be a lot of travelling involved, especially in the journalism side of things. Often you will be shipped off to review a certain event taking place on the other side of the country. The actual workload can get a bit frustrating after a while, as well. The templating system we use on the magazines is rather restricting in the way it can stop us being as creative as we’d like to be. Overall though, I don’t regret my being here and hope to keep my job for the meantime anyway."
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