When creating Yuth Magazine, Carson Kropfl and I had a few goals in mind. The main one was we wanted to pull kids from social media and still provide them with entertainment they can find on TikTok or Instagram reels. Sounds like a problem with a simple solution right? Well, not at all.
Teens' attention spans have been fried by the perpetual dopamine hits they get from rapidly scrolling through their phones. My buddy Carson and I are no stranger to this as 19 year old's in college with screen times as bad as the rest. We knew building a magazine that countered this short attention span was going to take some design analysis. First, the long form write ups. Without pointing fingers we all know how long and strung out the writing can get in other magazines past and present. We see this as something only people a bit older have the attention spans to read. We conducted a test, it wasn’t very scientific but it was a test. We handed one of the leading magazines to a young teenager and said to check it out. It covered the sport he loved dearly: surfing. He sat down skimming through it looking at all the great photography occasionally reading when he found something he had to learn more about. That is when we got our idea to make the writing more short form than readers are used to. Our goal is to cut the shit out and put down the words that will give the backstory to the photo and send the message that's trying to be sent to the reader. Sometimes that still takes a few paragraphs and sometimes that takes one.
Next, our choice to cover multiple sports. It is rare you find a magazine that covers multiple sports. We felt like it was necessary to cover multiple sports because when kids open their instagram for you page they see all kinds of content. That is what keeps them coming back, the wild variety of entertainment at their fingertips. Johnny might not be a huge fan of skating because he focuses his time surfing but seeing someone doing something special in a sport that is adjacent to surfing like snowboarding or skating is what keeps him entertained. We are avoiding the classic ball sports like football and baseball because they are very news driven sports. The game happens and after everyone sees what happened the next day on social media the buzz of that story is gone. We believe those sports belong in the newspaper. When it comes to skating, snowboarding, surfing, music, and those style sports the story stands the test of time much better. Our stories in our first edition all give off a feeling we have been going for from the start: inspiration to go out in the world, be adventurous, try something new, and have some fun while doing it.
Lastly, we have one more thing up our sleeve. Every page is designed to be eye-catching and pop with color so the photos stand out and our readers feel drawn in. Mick Sowry, our head of design, has done an amazing job at showing his versatility in making a completely different magazine than what he's used to with the Great Ocean Quarterly. It was no surprise to us because his artistic skills reach far beyond just a graphic designer. In his own words here is his design analysis:
Mikey and Carson originally came to me to use some photographs. When I saw what they were attempting to do I offered to help as, since they were new to publication design, I could give them a shot at a really good start. It’s been enormous fun, putting on my best Yuth dancing shoes. Mikey says it well, in trying to keep things brief, but well written, having access to budding and established contributors, and developing articles ourselves as we discover what Yuth Mag could be. It has been like watching something being born, designing this. Not trying to copy, but trying to birth our look, and leaving enough room to evolve and keep evolving. Being free. Which is the point of being Yuth.
-Michael Walshe & Mick Sowry