INK Magazine

In the penultimate week before the Christmas Holidays, the official student magazine was launched. INK Magazine is an eMag, run exclusively by students at Fortismere, which aims to provide a place for all students to express creative ideas, experiment with journalism and develop their own voice in an environment of like-minded people.

We began the development of INK Magazine in January 2010, when the possibility for a student-led project, such as INK, arose. We researched into student-expression at other schools, and having been active members of the extra-curricular Student Council for several years decided that a free, student-led magazine would be the best way of engaging both those with an obvious interest and those who would otherwise not be interested in Student Voice.

Discussions over the feel and design of the magazine soon followed and several options were presented. This process of experimentation and refinement of ideas has been incredibly rewarding (if somewhat longwinded) in our development of INK. We then began talks with the designers (TPD Production, who design and print the school's prospectuses) and realised that this may be an area which could cause problems.

Initially, the design of the magazine was to be done by the company employed by the school, however we felt that this, too, should be a student role. In some cases, we found that layouts which had been designed by students came back 'redesigned' in the proof unsatisfactorily. This led to almost a year without a single publication. Possibly a lack of any teacher involvement meant that we were unable to liaise and debate with the publishers successfully, which may be a possibility to explore.

Eventually, we decided that an online 'eMag', resembling a mixture between formal website and creative blog would be best. We used the web-design and free hosting of www.weebly.com to design our magazine and have since decided that although content contribution is ongoing and flexible (eliminating deadlines, which prove a problem with Exam students), we will publish a 'summing up' of the previous term's month in December, April and July of each year.