Welcome to the Blog, Let's Talk About Genre!

This is my blog, where I will be documenting the process by which I create my magazine.  As I begin in this endeavor, I realized that I had a concrete list of things to consider:

• front page
• contents page
• double-page spread

But before I even get to the meat of the project, I have some important research to conduct.  (Tons of fun, I know right?)  So I must begin with the research, but what does that include, you may ask?  Well, hypothetical inquirer, I envision three major subject areas that I will tackle first.  They are genre, target audience, and the overall look I want to achieve with this project.  Obviously, each of these three different topics aren't completely cut and dry separate from one another, but separating them anyway is an easy way to organize them.  

Starting with the first of the three topics, I'll discuss the genre of magazine I want to produce.  My first task was to research the different genres there were.  I'm not sure what my expectations were, but I wasn't expecting nearly as many as I found.  From the website magazines.com, I was able to find an enormously extensive list of the many different categories of magazines!  That list was super long, so I can't really include it all in this blog post, but some of the genres that really stuck out to me were the ones listed under the "Science & Nature" section, which included "environmental", "nature", and "science".  The examples from these tabs were very similar to the kind of content I wanted to produce.  These included magazines from names like National Parks, Smithsonian, and National Geographic.  

After looking at and discovering the kind of genre I would like to use, I went on to see some prime examples.  The best place to do this seemed by looking at an article titled "Top 10 Nature Magazines".  This list included some of the same titles I had seen before but showed a clear distinction between two different types of this genre of magazine.  It's a bit difficult to label the two subsets, but the best way to describe it is that one looked more composed with few cover lines while the other boasted bright titles and lines of text that almost completely cover the main image.  I'm a fan of the former, which included examples like National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Popular Science.  

Looking at such great examples of the kinds of products I wish to emulate, I feel like I'm taking the first step toward creating my own magazine.  

P.S. Look forward to my next two posts where I will be first examining target audience and then overall look.

Citations:
"Browse All Categories." Magazines.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
"Top 10 Nature Magazines." All You Can Read. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.