Technology and Font

Yesterday we decided to explore the software we would be using to create our magazine. We decided we would use Canva since it is a free software and it is capable of making a very professional looking magazine. We spent the day learning the specifics of the software and how to use it. We each drafted a very basic cover just to learn how to do certain things. We learned how to insert pictures and text boxes, how to change font sizes, color, and type, and we learned many other things about the software. For the drafts we created we just used online pictures and not pictures we took, and made it a very simple cover. The only point of the draft was to learn how to use Canva. 

After making a draft we discussed what we wanted our font to be. We researched other hip hop magazines and looked at the font types they used to get an idea of what we would utilize. A common theme for hip hop magazines were they used very bold and distinct fonts for their title. We decided we wanted to follow this trend and pick a font that had very distinct and bold letters that stand out on a magazine cover. We have not yet decided the exact font we would want to use, but we have a general idea of what we are looking for now.

This is the draft I created on canva

Preliminary Exercises

Several preliminary exercises were completed before beginning this project. One activity we did was mark up the covers of magazines in order to learn the conventions of a magazine cover. We learned the aspects such as sweet spots, mast heads, puffs, etc.This activity helped us to learn the setup of a magazine cover and the aspects involved in making our own magazine cover. It helped in learning the purpose of all of the different conventions on a cover and to see what each specific piece was meant to do. We labeled several covers to fully understand the conventions of a magazine cover as well as what magazines use to make themselves stand out. We learned about the house style that magazines use to make themselves unique as well as the ode of address they use.

We used the first activities to complete our next preliminary exercise. We used what we learned about the conventions of magazine covers and applied it to creating our own magazine cover. We created a hip hop magazine titled "Music Monthly." We made this magazine where everything but the photo was hand drawn. We used our own house style and mode of address to make our magazine unique, and put into use all of the conventions we learned about from the previous activities into use. We utilized puffs, incentives, buzz words, a slogan, and many more conventions. This project was our first experience creating a magazine cover and it taught us how to approach making one in the future.

Annotated magazine for conventions

The preliminary magazine cover we created

Genre Research Continued

Today we continued to research the specific genres of hip hop music. The two that continued to stand out to us were gangsta rap and trap. The decision we were making was if we wanted to focus on up and coming artists in a specific sub genre of hip hop or just the hip hop industry overall. Ultimately we made the decision that focusing on the hip hop industry overall rather than a specific genre would be more beneficial for us. While gangsta rap and trap music were appealing topics to write about we made the decision that focusing specifically on one of these genres our magazine would have been too limited. 

The decision that we made was that if we focused on a specific genre then our audience for our magazine would be limited to only fans of that genre. If we focused on the overall hip hop industry however, our audience would be much larger, and our magazine would be appealing to many more people. In our research we looked at the popular artists for each genre and found out that not many genres had several very popular artists. What this showed us is that artists are a very wide variety of genres and it would have been very difficult to find many up and coming artists in such a specific genre. So, focusing on hip hop overall was beneficial for our content as well as the size of out audience. In the end we decided our genre would be up and coming artists in the hip hop industry.

This is a screenshot of the page we used to research the specific genres.

Genre Research

To find a specific genre to focus our magazine on we began by researching specific styles of hip hop. We knew we wanted to produce a hip hop magazine, but were unsure on exactly what it would be. We were not yet sure if we wanted to focus on a specific genre of hip hop or possibly a specific are in hip hop. If we decided to focus in on a specific style of hip hop we knew we wanted it to be a harder style. We began to research the specific style and some that stood out to us included, trap music, and gangsta rap. We did decide that our magazine would be focused primarily on up and coming artists in the rap industry, what we discussed today is if we would focus on up and coming rap artists in the overall rap industry, or in a specific style of hip hop. 

The idea to focus on only up and coming artists for our magazine was inspired by the XXL magazine's freshman edition. Every year, this is typically XXL's most popular edition of their magazine, showing how wildly popular the idea of new artists is. Since the edition is so popular, we decided we would make a magazine dedicated to this topic, since XXL is the only magazine that does this and they only do it once a year. There is not much competition for this style of hip hop magazine and it has proved to be successful in the past. 

Now that we had a specific area of hip hop that we wanted to focus on, we had to decide if we wanted to focus on a specific genre of hip hop or stay in the overall genre of hip hop. We continued to research the specific genres, but were unable to reach a decision on what we would do.

XXL Freshman Edition

Magazine Title Revision

After further discussion we have decided against the title of caution. When we thought further into what the title meant to a potential reader we decided that caution did not convey the meaning we intended. The word caution, rather than convey a hardcore meaning to compliment the music covered in our magazine, goes against the purpose of hip-hop music. Hip-Hop artists tend to not use caution when writing their music and tend to sway on the risky side with their lyrics. They include sensitive topics in their music and tend to use very graphic language. This all goes against the idea of caution. This is why we decided to scrap this title. We originally believed that the title of caution would convey a sense of warning to the potential reader and give them the idea that what was inside was risky potentially graphic content, but the title did the exact opposite. 

We now have two new ideas for a title: The Come Up and Reckless. The first title idea conveys the idea that our magazine will focus on only up and coming rappers. The title will show the reader what to expect when reading our magazine. We have decided that we do only want to focus on only up and coming rappers since there are not many other magazines on the market that do this. The title Reckless conveys the original message we were trying to convey. It shows the defiant atmosphere of hip-hop music. 

In the end we decided to go with the title The Come Up. We decided that this title fits not only the rap world, as coming up is a phrase often used when discussing new rappers, but gives the reader a great idea on what they will find in our magazine. It is a title that is not too long, yet not too dull. It is a great lengths and it is very eye catching. 

Magazine Title

Today, we discussed what we would title our magazine. We have decided that we want to create a hip-hop magazine, but have not yet decided on a more specific genre. We have decided that we do not want our title to be too long so it is a catchy trendy title. Too long of a title would turn away potential readers. Our target audience for a hip-hop magazines would be those a part of the younger demographics. Knowing that this demographic tends to have a shorter attention span we want to keep our title shorter to tend to this younger audience.

We tried to come up with a short catchy title that conveyed the sense of toughness. We know that hip-hop can tend to be very hardcore music and wanted to create a title that would reflect this. Trying to find words that could be potential titles we were thinking along the lines of words such as tough, and solid. We used a thesaurus to find words similar to these so we could find the right one for our title. After considering many titles we finally decided our title would be Caution. This title reflects the hardcore nature of hip-hop music. The word caution is often used to warn when something serious has occurred. We have used it in this sense to show readers that serious material is included in our magazine. This tile also would entice potential readers to purchase our magazine as the word caution creates a sense of ambiguity for potential readers, as they may wonder what it is we are cautioning them from.