NYU Summer Publishing Institute: Final Magazine Project

For three weeks I learned from the best-of-the-best in the magazine industry: Cindi Leive, David Zinczenko, Pilar Guzman, Lavinel Savu, Matt Bean, Lorin Stein, and Brandon Holley to name a few. Beginning with lectures, I got a strong foundation in the basics of all facets of magazine publishing. My skills were put to the test with a final project that required an integration of all that I learned. The assignment was to create a launch plan for a new magazine complete with mockups of the magazine, website, and feature article as well as a social media plan, profit and loss statement, marketing plan, and app concept. Every student was assigned to both a group and a role, in my case the fashion and beauty group as executive editor. My role meant that I was responsible for ensuring that everything we turned in got done on time and was grammatically correct. I was able to draw on my skills from previous internships (Winter 2010, Spring 2011) but I was definitely pushed to learn new things.

My group came up with a fashion magazine concept that we felt was unlike anything on the newsstand today — street fashion. Rather than dwelling on the runways, we wanted our readers to gather inspiration from real life. This led us to make bold artistic decisions that some advisors felt were “masculine” but we stuck to our guns and did well in the presentation competition!

Without further ado, here’s what our launch book looked like (with credit to my group’s incredible art director Shannon Coffey.

Note: Since there was no budget for these designs, we had to use images from the web for educational purposes. No copyright infringement is meant!