Overview

Måns Zelmerlöw is a Swedish pop singer, songwriter, television presenter, and philanthropist who is most famous for winning the 2015 edition for Sweden of the Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria with his song, “Heroes”.

The Eurovision Song Contest draws in close to 200 million viewers each year from across Europe, handily beating large American events such as the Super Bowl. It is one of the longest-running television programmes in the world, having started broadcasting annual competition starting in 1956.

For Americans still not convinced of its international appeal, it is also has been a pretty big jumping point for European singers looking to branch out of Europe, most notably ABBA, Celine Dion, and more recently, Duncan Laurence.

For any people who want to learn more about what the Eurovision Song Contest is in a more musical style, please click here.

The purpose of this project is to create content that resonates with fans.

This project features elementary usage of Adobe InDesign, PhotoShop, and cognitive psychology principles.

Process

As a traditionally "non-creative” person, I take great inspiration from the makers that make the world around us real. Since my field of work informs makers, I really wanted to do something from the perspective of a maker so that way I can see more of the process that they use on a day-to-day basis.

Research

To get started, I first needed to figure out what was already out there in terms of fan-made content for people in the music industry.

In general, I found that labels tended to promote their artists through:

1. Magazine articles, both print and digital (becoming less relevant but meh)

2. Press releases (not as much traction for fans, but useful for journalists)

3. Photobooks (very common in East Asia esp Japan, less common in the West)

4. Social Media (big one, and crucial)

On the flipside, labels can also utilize earned media to promote in places such as:

1. Fanzines

2. Fan edits/cams (very popular for Twitter stans)

3. Art

4. Social Media (everyone loves some social media)

I also wanted to consider a target audience. For the most part, Måns is more well-known in Europe, particularly in the Nordics and in Poland, it makes the most logical sense to target writing towards a European audience. With the information I’ve gathered about the industry, I decided to establish my key values to create a meaningful product.

The final task was to select the medium of expression. Like most other Eurovision artists that won in the last decade, Måns’s fan content is centred around Instagram content (usually photos and stories), purpose-built websites, and art. There is an existing fanzine for Måns which is pretty popular, but I wanted to take my own stab at it.

Key Values

1. Be as authentic to a largely European audience as possible.

   • Avoid North American and antipodean varieties of English 🤬

   • Embrace British and “Euro English” 😀

2. Highlight Måns work and sponsorships that were emphasized throughout the year, especially as it relates to Melodifestivalen + Eurovision.

3. Create something Månsters really like.

Creating

I used a bunch of spreads from professional magazines such as GQ to establish a framework for how I would organize content on a page. These references were also critical to informing my understanding of how people read content that is presented on larger spreads (I displayed everything on an A4 size canvas)

From there, I put in text, images, and graphics where I felt appropriate using Gestalt principles such as common region and continuity to link related content to each other.

After playing around with different layouts and getting things where I wanted to be from a visual standpoint, I added some elements that I felt would be on-brand. By stylizing page numbers and text with fonts and little flairs, I hoped to make it seem more resonant as a document.

Mock-Ups