what's in a name?

For this posting, I'm going to start considering names for my magazine project. Mrs. Stoklosa informed us as to the importance of a name that's catchy and interesting. But it's also important to have a name that'll be easily recognizable as part of the genre since this is intended to be a new magazine. So, to begin with my research I looked at other magazines within my genre. 

There are magazines that seem to be more clearly linked to fashion through names, such as (obviously) Fashion, InStyle and Vanity Fair. However, there are magazines that are more obscure with their titles. Some of these include Lucky, Nylon and No Tofu.

Now the question is, what marks this distinction? And what effect does it have on the magazine brand itself? Well, there's an article from Flipboard that advises as to how to best name a magazine. One of the important pieces of advice mentioned is the importance of having a title with a meaning that is funny or eye-catching. However, it is also important to make sure the name does not exclude or offend anyone. This matters because the magazine is hoping to reach a large audience of all kinds of people.

Another suggestion of the article is to utilize figurative language strategies to interest a possible reader. Such as allusion, hyperbole, idioms, onomatopoeia, or puns. One of the strategies that I found interesting was called portmanteau, which is the blending of two words to make one. Another one was malapropism, which is utilizing a word that sounds similar to the one typically used in a phrase. 

Apart from this, the magazine provides the advice of using the tagline of the magazine to further clarify the meaning if it is not immediately clear. And in addition to this, finding a vocabulary that is related to your meaning or paying attention to Latin roots may also be helpful. So based off of this advice, I decided to look for synonyms of fashion words. This was a strategy used by Vogue, as this word is a synonym of fashion relating to the fashion popular at a given time or period. 

As for my own search, some words I found were the following:

• fad
• form
• look
• mode
• model
• pattern
• shape
• thing
• tone
• trend
• appearance
• bandwagon
• chic
• configuration
• convention
• craze
• cry
• cultism
• cultus
• custom
• cut
• figure
• furor
• latest
• line
• make
• mold
• rage
• usage
• vogue
• dernier cri
• faddism

from Thesaurus.com. 

From this list, I really liked mode, chic, and craze. Mode has been used before, and chic has been used for a Spanish magazine, but currently doesn't have English connections. 

I also decided to take a look at words in other languages, especially Italian and French since these are two languages with popular involvement and influence in the fashion industry. In Italian, I found the words stile, modello, classe, moda and alta moda or alla moda. In French, I found the words mode, stylisme, à la mode, and sens de la mode.

Overall, this research has been very helpful and I believe that from all of these words I'll be able to find a fitting title for the magazine. I am very interested especially in the Italian words that I found. 

representation in fashion!

So my partner and I discussed our options for genres and we've decided we're going to make a fashion magazine! For this posting, I'll be looking more into representation in fashion magazines. Specifically, women's fashion magazines, as this is our focus. 

Several of the articles I looked at discussed a lot of issues still existing in the fashion industry with diversity. One of these was an article from The Independent, which described how the most popular international magazines only had people of color on the covers 22% of the time in the last decade. This statistic was gathered by counting issues in the most important month of women's fashion magazines, September. This important month was interesting to find out about. It may even affect our decisions when considering which issues we will be doing for our magazine. We were considering doing issues based on seasons, but we may consider doing monthly issues.
Another statistic on this same article informed me that in the last decade, non-white faces have been on the cover of only one out of every five covers. And when Beyonce was on the September issue of Vogue in 2015 she talked about this issue in representation. When she entered the industry, she was told it would be difficult for her to get on magazine covers because of her race. This is important when considering what models we will photograph for our own fashion magazine. We want to be forward and bring a more diverse selection of models to light.

However, there were important strides being made in the fashion magazine industry in 2018 in regards to diversity. For example, The Glowup site provided a statistic on fashion magazines in the United States. In the past five years, they estimated that about 48.4% of covers of important fashion magazines included people of color. There was also a 32.3% increase in people of color on the September issue from 2017 to 2018. However, there is still important work to be done to display more diversity in fashion magazines on the international level. By possibly addressing these strides and issues with diversity in our magazine, we could be taking an interesting perspective on the fashion industry.

genre research - travel!

Hi again! For this post, I'm going to be looking into the travel genre to see if that's what I may want to pursue for this project. The travel genre interests me because I personally very much enjoy traveling. I also love the idea of travel magazines making any individual place look beautiful and desirable. Travel magazines find beauty in the world in my experience. 

So first, I will be starting with the first part of a magazine. What aspects are common in covers of travel magazines? Well generally the masthead is bold and large to be attractive to the magazine's audience. These magazines are popular in bookstores, so it's important that the masthead grabs the attention of a passerby. Sometimes the mast head will be the location that the magazine is focusing on, which is another way to grab attention. The colors used in fonts and other design aspects usually match the colors of the main image of the cover page. 

When it comes to inside the magazines, travel magazines usually have advertisements from hotels and restaurants in the local area. This is important because in that way the person traveling will get to know the location better. Travel magazines also include a lot of photography of landscapes to display the beauty of each individual place. The magazine may also include pictures of the people in the location being focused on to allow the viewer to get a feel for the place. The color scheme started in the cover page may also be continued throughout the spreads for continuity purposes. The images displayed also usually have bright colors and happy tones to them to make the viewer want to travel there. 

These examples of travel magazines also generally feature the location of the travel magazine, which as I mentioned, is important in recognizing where the viewer of the magazine might want to go. These magazines also use lists like other genres of magazines to allow the viewer to feel as if they're getting something out of the magazine. Like "48 smart travel secrets" in travel. A passerby will be more likely to buy the magazine if they see "travel secrets" that will supposedly aid them on trips. Advice and personal experiences are also commonly written about in these magazines because they allow the reader to get a personal and real feel for the traveling location.

All in all, I found this genre to be very fascinating. I'm going to discuss with my partner as to what genre we will be choosing so I can go deeper into research this week. We are really interested in the travel, fashion, and animal genres. 

music project review!

In class, we created a project based off of a new artist in the music industry. We had to base this artist off of a song that we created a music video for. Our song was a pop song called “Carry On.”
The artist we created was a teenage boy with the stage name of Alex!. We used a variety of platforms and strategies to imitate a real marketing campaign for a real artist in the pop industry.

In order to find out more about artists in the pop genre, we researched artists such as Camila Cabello and Beyonce. Through our research we learned about the importance of using social media platforms and connecting with fans. We also learned about the importance of tv show appearances and creating a surprise element in the artist through this research. For example, Beyonce releases snippets of her videos before the official release, and we imitated this tactic with Alex!.

We utilized Spotify, Instagram and Snapchat to integrate this artist into the media world. These are some examples of our promotions on Instagram and Snapchat to begin to gain attention for
this artist:

We also utilized Spotify’s features for artists, such as playlist submissions in order to reach a larger audience.

Our marketing plan was based off creating a following for this artist through meet and greets and social media, then building through merchandise and appearances. This project was informative
as it taught me how to create a final product based off of informed facts and research. On my magazine, I will imitate this tactic by researching the genre I’m interested in before creating the
magazine. The project also taught me about creative direction and the nature of art, whether it be digital or physical media. All in all, the project taught me so much about how to direct
my final project.