The project is a soon-to-launch tablet magazine called The Urban Thinker. The Urban Thinker is an ideas magazine featuring America’s best black writers and their friends. A fuller description is below.
The magazine will be jazzy, but have an earthy sensibility and we are looking for a designer to help us visualize that. It’s the kind of magazine that well-educated creatives and thinkers who live in Brooklyn’s brownstones would read. The audience will consist of several age groups starting at age 28 and ranging into the 50s and 60s. So the look and feel should be mature, but not serious. The audience is relatively wealthy, and the magazine should look refined. But the audience doesn’t flaunt its money. So the magazine must avoid any appeal to crass commercialism. Any symbols of wealth should be understated.
The project will contain three phases. In the first phase, the designer will create our logo. If that’s successful, the designer will help us build a pilot website. If the pilot is successful, we’ll launch a tablet and work with a designer to adapt the web design to the iOS app.
Our team has a lot of technical skills and a clears sense of what we want from the website and web app. In fact, the website has been wireframe and version 1 of the tablet app has been built — using sample content. Still, we need a designer to help us polish our look and clarify our style. We are looking for someone with a great eye for design and user interface. The person doesn’t need to be an expert at CSS, but some knowledge would be useful. Nothing has to be hardcoded, but the designer will need to customize existing style sheets. So the willingness to dive in and play with CSS would be helpful. No other knowledge of coding is required or suggested.
Interested students should contact Kelly Virella at kvirella@gmail.com, and include a link to their portfolio.
More details about the magazine:
The Urban Thinker is the new monthly tablet magazine featuring America’s best black writers and their racial rainbow of friends. Our award-winning writers have worked for top news organizations like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR and are independent novelists, essayists and freelance writers. Our long-form essays, reports and photos tell tales of anger, love, disappointment, pride, guilt and the full range of human emotions, answering with humor, lucidity and nuance important questions about black culture and race like “What happens when the gentrifier is black?” and frivolous questions like “Why is the pop star Prince such a control freak?”
Reading us opens a window to the high- and lowbrow thoughts and ideas of an iconic generation, the beneficiaries of the civil rights movement. Fifty years after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X., this is how we see the world.
Each issue of The Urban Thinker’s tablet magazine consists of 5 to 7 articles containing well-crafted, in-depth writing and showpiece photography that takes weeks to produce. We don’t waste people’s time endlessly repeating the same news story as every other news outlet, or baiting people into clicking links by serving up sensational headlines and stories. We don’t stir up false controversies to get eyeballs.
