RIBBON CLUB — an independent lifestyle media outlet focusing on visual culture, aesthetics, and self-expression in everyday life.
The project explores how people forge their own style and express their individuality through clothing, objects, surrounding spaces, photography, music, creativity, and other mediums.
This project creates a space where students can explore diverse materials from various authors and share their own work.
The Ribbon serves as a symbol of the project and is integral to its visual identity. It evokes individuality, creativity, attention to detail, and human connection, without restricting the scope of the media themes.
The core theme of RIBBON CLUB is visual culture and everyday self-expression.
Disciplines:
— Personal Style and Fashion
— Objects and Space
— Visual Culture
— Lifestyle and Rituals
— People and Self-Expression
These disciplines are united by the shared concept of exploring individuality through the visual.
RIBBON CLUB distinguishes itself from typical aesthetic media because it is not limited to publishing visual references, trends, and collections. The project independently produces editorial content and invites people to become active participants in the media’s development.
Ecosystem
The RIBBON CLUB ecosystem is built upon two resources: the main one—our dedicated website—and a supplementary one, Instagram (*From a company recognized as a terrorist organization in the Russian Federation).
The site serves as the central platform for the project, integrating posts from the media’s creators with a dedicated user space. It hosts authorial projects, publications, visual research, interviews, themed collections, and stories. It also provides the functionality for participants to create profiles, publish their own content, create collections, and interact with other users.The supplementary resource acts as a channel for attracting a new audience and offers a more concise showcase. It helps rapidly convey the media’s aesthetic and character through a general feed, introduces users to its materials, and directs them to the main website.
Information Sources
Curated Media.
This is the primary external source from which to draw ideas for new episodes, topics, and other segments. These resources are not meant for copying finished content, but rather for discovering themes and phenomena that media creators can investigate independently or through collaborations.
Examples:Dazed — youth culture, fashion, art, music, photography, and modern aesthetics Vogue Runway — collections, fashion shoots, outfit details The Gentlewoman — personal style, portraits, interviews, and stories Aperture — photography, authorial projects, visual research The Creative Independent — interviews with creative individuals, their experiences, workflows, and personal perspectives on specific themes
Authorial Channels.
These are the websites of designers, photographers, artists, creative studios, brands, musical artists, and cultural organizations. They are necessary to receive information directly from the creators. For instance, if a post or the placement of another publication requires material related to object design, you can draw content from the pages of real individuals and substantiate the information with existing examples.
Museum archives, collections, and websites. Theoretically, it resembles the first resource—these sources allow you to gather material on various subjects and discover new topics for future publications. They can also become material sources from which specific theses and reflections can be drawn, supported by citations and quotations.
Examples:The Metropolitan Museum of Art — history of objects, costumes, jewelry, art, and decorative design MoMA — contemporary art, graphic and product design, photography
Visual content platforms.
These are used to discover new directions for topics for future publications (Pinterest, Are.na, and others). For every image, you must record the license or the author’s permission.
Original Content.
The media authors independently produce published material based on all the sources listed above. This results in original publications, which lend uniqueness and interest to the media. This also includes proprietary columns and other formats.
User-Generated Content.
This category includes all content published on the platform by other users.
Data schema divided into human/machine processing
Machine processing handles all the work with drafts, assisting in the search for new topics and processing existing ones, sourcing materials, and inventing new sections as needed. The human, however, refines the resulting templates to reach the final outcome.
For instance, in a task involving the conceptualization of future issues, the machine is given an introductory prompt with a general direction for how the upcoming issues should look. In turn, it suggests various formats, specific themes, and research subjects. The user reviews all the material to determine the relevance of the data received and decides which elements can be utilized later on.
The tool also assists in analyzing a database of existing publications to avoid thematic repetition and suggest avenues for media development (new formats, sections, collaborations, etc.).
Example workflow for drafting publications:Initial direction (topic, desired final outcome) > machine processing (draft text generation, material search and analysis, source identification and extraction) > human refinement (source verification, text editing to final state, publication preparation)
Guidelines for Automated Services
Our services assist users in managing information at every stage leading up to final publications. For instance, they help with topic ideation, generating template texts, developing headline variations, and defining formats.
- Information Search and CollectionThe service allows for the automation of searching thematic directions or works based on a specific, existing query. It searches existing sources and outputs articles, interviews, studies, or other resources that match the essence of the publication. If you use text or ideas from any sources, you must retain all links to the original material.2. Information ProcessingWhen working with publications—after the service has selected materials, it constructs a cohesive text based on them. It is crucial not to copy every phrasing from the found resources. You are required to analyze the material and produce new content based on that analysis. The output is a draft, complete with a title, an introduction, the main body, and a conclusion, if necessary. You can also automatically generate short descriptions for website previews and adapted versions of the text for supplementary resources.When working on topic ideation—based on the existing publication database, the system suggests new directions or searches for ways to develop existing material in greater depth. For example, if the database contains articles about vintage accessories, personal finds, and building an individual style around them, the system might suggest combining all these tracks into a comprehensive study on the role of accessories in shaping a person’s identity.
Automated services are responsible for searching, processing, systematizing, and preparing information. The editorial team is responsible for updating ideas and topics, authorial voice, quality, and the final content of publications.
