Robot Arms Pub Zine Target Audience

[wayspurrchen]

Hey y'all, some discussions in the Slack channel around the aesthetic and web design brought up a good point (thanks @exprat for revealing the good questions) - who exactly is the target audience? Is it just us, at our current size? Is it everyone who is / should be into cyberpunk? Is it the larger world? We should figure this out and come to an agreement as a core group in terms of what we want to put out into the world. As @exprat puts it, "Like five issues from now, if this project does what you imagine it doing, where do you (all) imagine that somebody could unexpectedly stumble on a copy of this?"

Here's my take - I'm interested in bringing mainstream people to the weird a little bit. I draw the comparison of what I do with Glitchet, which manages to make glitch art, which is generally sort of inaccessible and weird, seem cool and trendy, like something you should be in on. Contrast this to Stallio's website and Rosa Menkman's website. They're both brilliant people with a wild aesthetic, but it's pretty frightening to someone who isn't seriously game.

I'd love to create something that brings the best elements of cyberpunk and dresses up the fringe aspect and makes it feel modern and "commercial", despite being open source, fairly radical in nature, and very system-thinking heavy. I imagine eventually getting to an aesthetic like Nautilus, with the chaos peeking out from behind the guise of really good design.

Of course, that's just my take - I naturally tend towards "growth hacking" things. What do y'all think? What's the vision in your mind? What do you absolutely want to do? What do you absolutely not want to do? Who do you want to create for?

[sonyamann]

I'm ambivalent / agnostic on this. As long as the content is readable / viewable, I don't care very much about the styles wrapped around it. Of course I want it to look good, but that could happen in a lot of different ways.

Regarding target audience more specifically -- my tendency is to not worry about this and see who's interested, rather than going after a specific type of person. It's going to be eclectic regardless simply because of the nature of volunteer-based collaboration.

[tek-witch]

Maybe a better way to ask this question then is to find out what content contributors really mean to create and include.

What it looks like depends on what it's for, and what it's for depends entirely on what people intend to contribute.

[r4d1n]

I am not really sure about the target audience, that is a big question to try to nail down right now. But I also feel like I don't really know who's out there and so I agree with Sonya: Let's see who is interested. That's basically how this is coming together already as far as the chat group and the people who want to work on this project now. I also think it can be hard to know what one is making/who it is for when it is still in such an embryonic stage. We should revisit this question later on.

I'm not necessarily worried about aiming for the broadest possible appeal, but design-wise I think I still more or less agree with @wayspurrchen. I don't think the layout should be really intense or distracting, though I am game to include work from people like the two in your post if they want to submit it. I think we should shoot for a layout which is like a frame/backdrop that can set the stage for a variety of interpretations of the theme(s) of cyberpunk. Certain colors and the right font could do this nicely.

At the same time I feel what was brought up in the slack about keeping the punk in cyberpunk and maintaining a certain DIY aspect to the aesthetic. There are a lot of directions that that can be taken so I think it's important that we stay open to experimenting with different kinds of layouts as we go along.