Project Title: Visionary Artistry Magazine (Va Mag)
Project Type: Launched an online magazine to share the background stories of underground artists and showcase their artwork.
Project Date: June 2010 – present
My Role: I am the co-founder of Va Mag and I serve as the production director/editor for the magazine. I manage the content for the website and assign story ideas to Va Mag interns. I also coach them through the writing process.
Project Summary: Visionary Artistry Online magazine was created to expose the talent of underground artists and shed light on their background stories. Although Va Mag’s main focus is underground artists, we also cover mainstream artists and share their stories on the same platform.
The Challenge: Back in June 2010, before Instagram became popular it was difficult for artists to get press coverage and for people to view their work, especially if they weren’t well known. Va Mag was created to rectify this issue. We built everything from scratch for this project and used a magazine theme to create the website on WordPress.We made a few amateur mistakes in the beginning but now we have mastered the platform.
The Solution: We researched artists from all over the world, reviewed their work, developed feature stories and published them on the Va Mag website. We shared the stories with the artists, in turn the artists would share their story with their own network bringing more exposure and traffic to the online magazine. For about 80 percent of the artists the Va Mag story was their first time being featured in a publication.
The Results: Va Mag grew fast and eventually artists were reaching out to us from Japan, Africa, California and other places requesting interviews with our writers so they could be featured in the magazine.