Concept Magazine: Hyphen
Cover for the May Issue of "Hyphen"
Spread for a story on student artists
Audience
Hyphen's audience are people interested in the changing shape of American society, and the stories of hyphenated-Americans.
It would target the 18-45 range, leaning toward young adults. The magazine would easily be replicated online, and would benefit from the embedding of media assets. It would target an audience similar to Vice.
Process
I took feedback and reorganized my text to a clear, block-grid. It made it less distracting for the readers to follow the text. I also resized my text to 10-by-11.
I put a yellow, elongated-rectangle around the title to evoke the feeling of a hyphen, much like the folio layout. I created contrast between “outspoken” and “student poets reverse the campus gaze” through color, weight and font. The elongated and compact grids and layouts allow the content to be translated to the web with ease. It would look much like this story I designed for interactive storytelling.
The story is based off a story Matthew Choi and I produced for our Interactive Storytelling class. You can see how I would have designed the interactive elements for that story here.
Challenges
I wanted to introduce both of the artists by the end of the first page, so I had a lot of text to lay out. I also had to organize the text in a way that didn’t look out of control. Due to the use of many hyphenated words, I had to put a lot of attention to make sure hyphens from line-breaks were minimized.
The photo was a bit distracting in the top, left corner because of a door frame. This made it difficult to draw attention to the title. My title was not large, another challenge to drawing attention. However, I used the yellow from my color palette to draw in as much attention through color.
Once I laid out the title, the byline was awkwardly floating. I moved the byline inside of the rectangle in the final version.
The two pictures on the cover were a challenge to work with. A lot of the area is skin, rather than eye. It creeped some people out. The skin tones also made laying out taglines a challenge.
What I Would Do Differently
I would try to find a different title layout as it makes it look as though the sentence is “Outspoken: student poets reverse the campus gaze,” rather than the actual “outspoken student poets reverse the gaze.”
I would also have worked longer on the photos to get better assets.
Recognition
I want to thank my professor, Susan Mango Curtis, for helping me shape this magazine to make sense to a broader audience.
I also want to thank Denny McAuliffe for teaching me how to pitch and shape stories covering Indigenous peoples. It helped me shape the pitch on this magazine concept.
