As I decided to work on the word gurbet and homesickness I interviewed my mother on zoom and asked her questions about home, food and language. The same questions I asked other interviewees and it went really well she responded to all questions well and she chose to speak to Turkish because she can explain herself better so my publication will be bilingual including both Turkish and English transcripts. This is a challenge as there is a lot of content and I need to figure out how to create not too text-heavy pages as including both English and Turkish on each page can be too much. I will solve this issue later on. I wrote the transcribe and did exactly the same as other interviewees and annotated in different sections.




The blue highlights are the parts I believed was the most important sections and that needed to be highlighted she told me so many stories about us moving to here that i didnt rememeber or realised at the time, i didnt know how she felt or thought about as i was so little and i only remember things from my perspective. i believe this project kind of made me connect back to the days we left home and started a new life here i realised what a huge impact it had on all of our life and its a very challenging times for all of us and im glad im able to share these stories with people.
Once i did my mothers interviews i knew i needed to speak to my dad as well as his experience was completely new and more challenging as he came to uk to work without us and this probably had made his expereince lot more harder. I know he has loads of stories that would shape the project in a more deeper way. So thats another thing on the to do list.
I started to create mind maps about home within home concept and even cover page what kind of visual symbols can i use to represent these feelings. In the mindmap there is traditional symbols and objects which i thought can be used to show the culture. one of them is the curtains (perde) which are hand made the patterns are very unique and i remember them from my childhood. Another thing is the the home inside, my first initial was taking photographs of objects and tools brought back from home that migrants connect with maybe there is a way that i can incorporate that into my publication. This is a significant issue because every Turkish person that i know of whenever they go home they always bring back ingredients such as foods, inside the house such as caydanlik which is a tea maker specifically for turkish tea that every turkish household has from turkey or they are bought from the turkish shops in london. Also, i thought the car journey is also iconic for people travelling back to turkey these are mostly called alamanci or gurbetci as it comes from the guest workers in germany as german turks travelling back in cars full of stuff they are bringing back. This is also an iconic and significant migration my research showed with a plane it is 2,106 miles between turkey and uk so i thought maybe i can play with this figure in the publication to show the distance and the feeling of far away. Other things I thought about was colours, red and oranges are very traditional and common colours used in many designs as it comes from the flag and other symbolic objects, I thought about using symbols mentioned in the interviews such as plates, cutlery and dantel which is what Melin said she always has in her house in cardiff it just makes her feel safe and reminds her off her grandmother. These are all symbols i thought that can work well with the home within home concepts as they are creating mini turkey in their houses in UK.

After the first mind map I did more and this time it was mainly focused on the cover imagery and this was just to get the ideas out of my head and so its there when i need it. The most common ones were like border lines, showing borders in lines but i know this was already done many times before. The next were again focused on distance and miles between turkey and uk which i thought in really cool typography it would look different.

These were the contents I thought about the publication, this process was all about thinking about everything I have and deciding what needs to incuded and message of the publication. As I decided the now will focus on gurbet theme and homesickness in turkish immigrants in swindon especially my parents. The content sheet on the left was tge old one which i thought about including every single interview including the designers which didnt fit into the homesickness theme but i decided that thats not what i want to communicate and i want to explore the word gurbet so now the final content includes:
articles
Migrant, memory, food and home-building article
History of Turkish migration
Interviews with parents
Photographs about migrated objects into UK
Food recipes and language differences.
I know as the time goes on and as I develop this project i will have more content.


VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
To start off the visual process I first chose typefaces where I felt represented the two cultures, the first one is a script typeface called Bickham Script Pro and then a modern sans serif typeface Roboto regular . The colour i was using was #e82629, this really nice deep rich red which i think works for both cultures and stands out. The first initial type combination can be seen below, I thought the script typeface showed the romantic and delicate side of the Turkish culture, most typefaces in Turkish and turkey are mainly scripts as due to the Arabic history and ottoman Turkish, I feel like I can do more research into typography to develop my knowledge. Once I decided on the two typefaces I started to create the layouts on each section.

I also did some sketches today to visualise my editorial pages from the beginning, these are rough sketches to try and understand how i can place the content and what kind of arrangements i can make in order to create the best outcome. It includes some sketches about article pages, interviews and mainly mixture of photographs and body copy. I think i will use these drafts as a start to build the spreads. They seem to work together and focused on information.

these sketches also are different arrangements of content pages or other photograph page where its focused on migrated objects. I think these sketches will be a good start to the desiging process and its mixture of all the inspirations from other projects.

The below images are the first initial drafts of the publication, it foucses on two coloumn paragraphs and the two typeface titles. I wanted to keep it very simple and clean, the first article in the publication will be about the migration from turkey to UK to give the reader a history of how turkish people came and it includes the different categories as people shouldnt just say turkish a theres kurdish turkish speaking community and then cypriot turkish people so its not good to generalise. The second page is the top right, I tried to break the quote into the other page, this is the story from an articlr about a guy who misses home, the end of the page he said migration is a hard thing in lebanese so i made the text the script to communicate the feeling of home. I dont think i like this page as its not readable and it doesnt work. The other design is bottom left is another article I want to use in the publication this article i read and it instantly made me think i need to include in the publication because it talks about the memory and food related to migrant memories that it might not all be negative. The paragraphs are seperated into 3 on the right and then the pull out quote is seperated intwo three parts on the right.



I then worked on how how to add the interviews and I wasn’t sure how to place them as I liked the style from the german graphic designers in small short paragraphs but I do have loads of content as I asked many questions. I’m still playing around and trying to figure out how to place these interviews. I used gradient on the left page as i thought it showed memory feeling and looking home as its fuzzy and shows the nostalgia.





These are the photographs I took when I was home, I editted them b&w so it fits the nostalgic feel of the editorial.




INSPIRATION
I needed some inspiration so I came across these editorials which are so nice and works perfectly with the style I am using.




These are the editorial pages for the interviews, I included an image of a simple home table to give that raw and simple feeling and added the title on the page in separated sections. The mixture of sans serif and script represents the Turkish and Kurdish culture. I liked this page and I think it was a good way to break up the system.

I needed some feedback at this point because I was doing loads of sketches and layouts but I didn’t know whether it was working or not as we was in easter break I asked my friends in my course for their feedback and this was their main points. I agree with all of them. I will take on board all of them and develop my editorials more.
FEEDBACK 1:
Needs another colour maybe
more imagery
text too heavy on some pages
softer red to make it more delicate
FEEDBACK 2 :
Break white pages with visual or oriental symbols
needs more colours
symbols?
Visuals from Turkey and UK, more cultural objects and visuals.








































































