After spending time thinking about what my Personal Project would be, I finally decided what I want to do. As a teenager who likes to use their free time to go over the internet, I found that visiting well-known online publication sites such as Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan has become one of my favorite forms of entertainment. I have seen articles about small businesses, personal interests, book reviews, etc. I mainly enjoy going through their articles that feature artists and other talented people on their platforms. However, I was also highly inspired by many of them. The way Teen Vogue inspires me is from how fascinating they get to feature a lot of young passionate people on their site and manage to add information and facts about the people they interviewed as a form of entertainment for other teenagers around the world. From there, I figured that I want to explore the behind-the-scenes of creating published contents and to experience collaboration with people to have them contribute to it, therefore my learning goal for my Personal project is to learn the communication and writing process in constructing an independent publication.
In relation to my learning goal, in order for me to construct an independent publication, I have decided that my product goal for my Personal Project would be to create an independent magazine that features a bunch of teenagers that live in the city I grew up in, Jakarta. I have been seeing a lot of people my age who are also a bunch of my mutuals in Jakarta that shares their interests and achievements on social media, it includes owning their own label/business, digital art accounts, youth-driven platforms, and many others that gives me an idea that it would be a great opportunity to collaborate with some of these talented young people and feature them in my independent magazine that I will create for this project.
For my final product, I created a one-time publication of an independent magazine, which highlights some teenagers of Jakarta to share their long time achievements or interest. My magazine consists of 35 pages and is available digitally in PDF form. The whole process of creating this magazine has impacted both myself and my learning. The research I did has inspired me and motivated me to create similar projects in the future which tells me that I will make Kolaborasee a real independent magazine for teenagers to enjoy. The electronic publishing platform, issuu.com, I think impacted me the most. I was able to explore different published independent magazines that were made by teens for teens such as; Kaleo Journal, FORGE. Art Magazine, Local Wolves, and Flash Thrive. These magazines were able to construct, plan, and get inspiration for ideas which is why I ended up with the product I created for this project. In my product, the way I arranged the content was actually through looking through those magazines, since it was something exact that I initially wanted to create, and I think I have reached that goal. The people I interviewed also have impacted a lot throughout this project. I learned and understood more about patience and possibilities. Before I sent out all the request letters to the selected people I wanted to feature in my magazine, I thought the process would come easy and simple, but I encountered a lot of unexpected possibilities. This process taught me patience in a way where not responding to messages to impossible deadlines occurred, they all taught me that not everything will come to a good end.
I think that the theme of the magazine itself is pretty eye-catching, I was able to use some of my film photographs which I took and put them as some of the backgrounds for a few pages. I chose a light color scheme for the pages where I include texts and that it fits best to contrast the dark text, making it easy for viewers to read the texts. I believe that the interview questions I generated for the people I ended up interviewing perfectly fit well with the individual’s interests and achievements. I think overall, it's clear and very easy for anyone to understand, this can be seen through the appropriateness of the language. I did not use any unfamiliar slang that might not be understandable to all, but I do think I need to improve my translation skill when I had to translate some Indonesian words to English in my product. And lastly, the research I did for this project highly helped me with structuring the finished product because I had visited helpful sources off the internet and from published works.