Day 6

DAY 6: Crafting a Cover

To utilize and learn about our resources, my group and i decided to start crafting our own magazine cover. We used Canva.com as an easy tool to create a cover if our magazine, and looked through our options given to us to see if we can use any templates. A major tool we looked through was the font. There was a wide range of fonts to choose from and we needed the perfect font to support our magazine title: "The Come Up." We needed to find a bold hard-hitting font to truly represent the type of artists we will be featuring on our magazine. We looked through bland fonts to bubbly font to find the perfect font for our cover. Eventually we settled on our font and proceeded to look for cover templates to craft an image of what our magazine will look the closest to when we have the final pictures to actually put on our cover. 

Day 5

DAY 5: Preliminary Exercises

Towards the beginning of this school year, my group and I deconstructed the cover of a magazine to further understand the elements needed to craft a perfect magazine. This deconstruction led us in the direction we needed to conduct this project. We learned about the importance of the mode of address and how it influences our audience's opinion on whether or not to pick up the magazine in the store or not. We learned about the importance of the font and size of our title. These factors can influence an outside view of a magazine as a title that is small and uninteresting is not going to get purchased while something that jumps out at you from the magazine stand will interest you enough to buy it or, at the least, pick it up and skim through it. These preliminary exercises were enough to help understand what goes into a magazine that will actually make it interesting.

My group and I also crafted the cover of a magazine, this truly helped us discover how to appeal and draw in an audience with just a cover. We created a hip-hop oriented magazine covering the rap artist Drake being deceased to try and "bait" the audience into purchases. The article was about Drake's career being dead after the release of terrible tracks and albums. Anyways, the magazine taught us how to craft a magazine cover that would be visually appealing to emotions. Our words and our title needed to correspond with the image to bring the audience to be encapsulated in the cover enough to purchase it.

Day 4

DAY 4: Genre Day

After a long weekend of thinking, my group and I came to an agreement and decided to make the genre of our magazine: Up and coming artists in the hip-hop scene. We see this genre as a beneficial plan to both us and the young artists that are trying to find their way into the cutthroat industry that is the rap game. Our magazine will be the number one source for discovering new artists in the hip-hop industry and will give them the platform they need to sign to a label, get their name out there, or get features from major artists. One of my group members researched different genres to help provide clarity on what we should be looking for in our new artists that we will feature. This brought us to a realization that we should just focus on the new artists in the hip-hop scene rather than up and coming artists in general.

We decided to choose this as our genre, because choosing new artists in general would broaden our search way too much causing confusion among ourselves and our audience. The specificity of new artists in the hip-hop genre will always appeal to one audience rather than appealing to certain audiences on certain issues. If we were to narrow our genre down to a specific section of hip-hop, we would be limiting our choices making magazine topics and production much harder to conduct due to lack of an option to explore different typed of hip-hop. 

Day 3 Pt. 2

DAY 3 Pt. 3: White Text

So, I've been having extreme technical difficulties with the previous blog. I took some text from the genres of rap and all of my text turned white. I've been working on this for a few days, but to no avail. I searched up many videos to try and fix this problem, but i seem to just be unable to fix this white text problem. On all of my other blog posts this isn't an issue, it is just THIS ONE POST. I've constantly checked all my other blogs and that made me realize it's a problem with the highlighting tool. For some odd reason, the highlighting tool can't be deleted once it's been put on so the text will just have to stay white. This is extremely disappointing, because I'm sure that none of my other blogs will have this problem and this one blog will be the only one that stands out when it isn't any less important than all of my other blogs. Overall, this white text problem is extremely aggravating and it's just permanently going to stay like this.

Day 3

DAY 3: Sub Genres 

To find a distinct genre, my group and I decided to research the different styles of hip-hop. We saw different categories such as Boom bap, Cloud rap, Conscious hip-hop, Crunk, Drill, Emo rap, Frat rap, and Horrorcore. None of these sub genres had even a slight appeal with my group, because they seemed like boring topics to cover. Some genres that did appeal to us were Trap rap and "Gangsta rap." This is a genre that is very prevalent with a lot of new artists coming up as they usually rap about money, cars, jewelry, etc. Now that we have a specific area of hip-hop that we wanted to focus on, we needed to see if we wanted to delve into a sub genre of focus on the overall genre with new rappers. With further research, we were unable to find a sub genre that we thought would fit our magazine, so we decided to just focus on the aspect of hip-hop all together and how up and coming rappers are attributing to this genre.

We were inspired by the hip-hop magazine "XXL" which focuses on up and coming rappers and gives them a spotlight in their Freshman issue. We wanted our magazine to be like the Freshman issue, but only about up and coming rappers to give them the spotlight that is very hard to achieve. We are hoping that those who read our magazine will be able to see a new artist and appreciate the work they have done to try to culminate an audience. It also may expose older audiences to the new hard hitting rappers of this generation as well. 

Day 2 Pt. 2

DAY 2 Pt. 2: Reasoning Behind the Switch

To go more in depth about our old title, we felt like the name "CAUTION" did not have the right connotation to represent a magazine about hard hitting music. The name caution to a consumer does not evoke excitement, while hip-hop should be an exciting genre that builds hype and creates energy. The consumer should be interested in what we have to say not "Cautious" of what's in our magazine. It's a boring name and will not attract any consumers in my opinion.

Overall, the title didn't hit the mark with what we were trying to achieve and challenge with this magazine. My group and I also believe that the best and most original idea for our magazine would be to focus on these new artists that will be the next generation and the new wave of hip-hop for the future to come. Therefore, we decided on "The Come UP" to be our magazine name because it fits our specific genre.

Day 2

DAY 2: Recklessly Coming Up

Despite the excellent name of our magazine, we decided that it would not emphasize the hard-hitting theme of our magazine, but it would instead make the audience seem weary of the magazine. After some thinking, we decided to change the name of our magazine to either "RECKLESS" or "The Come Up." These are two ridiculously hard choices, because our magazine could be about how reckless and free the hip-hop scene is. Rappers spend a lot of time blowing money on everything shiny: cars, jewelry, watches, etc. The name "Reckless" would perfectly describe what you will see in our magazine is about the hip-hop genre as a whole. If we were to choose the name "The Come Up," our magazine would be about the new age hip-hop artists on the come up. Most new artists do not have a platform to express themselves to the public due to their lack of mainstream popularity. Our magazine being about up and coming artists would give them exposure and broaden their audience to those who have no knowledge of who the new artist is and what they are about. After some time, we decided to choose the name "The Come Up" and focus on the genre of up and coming hip-hop artists.

Picture of us thinking of the title

Day 1

DAY 1: CAUTION!

Today, for our magazine project, my group and I discussed what we are going to title our magazine. Names ranged from "Hip-Hop Quick Stop" to "Bohemian Trapsody," but we ultimately decided to name our magazine, "CAUTION." We decided on this as the name our magazine because it truly encapsulates the atmosphere and message behind our magazine. We came up with this name while I was searching through Thesaurus.com and we found the word "Caution" and felt like it perfectly fit the hard-hitting Hip-Hop atmosphere. The name gives off a sense of suspense for what to expect in the magazine. Will the artist be a high speed lyrical monster? Or will his lyrics be hard hitting and have high energy?

The name is also in all capital letters, showing that the magazine will be about people in the Hip-Hop scene that will be HARD HITTING. This magazine is not for those looking to have a light read about the intricacies of classical music, the complex yet smooth ride of a jazz song, or the emotional roller coaster that R&B music provides. This magazine will provide an experience like none other before it. There will be no room for any downtime, this magazine will keep anyone reading! CAUTION...