The Vibin’ Newspaper
Editorial Design & Awareness Campaign (Part 1)
Self-directed project
Tools: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator
May 2020
This project started with something that bothered me. Hip-Hop and Rap have always carried a stigma that I don't think is fair. Many people focus on the negative without acknowledging what the genre means to the people who love it. I wanted to change that conversation, so I built a campaign around it. Before I could ask people to share their experiences with the music, I needed to lay the groundwork. That's what The Vibin' was for.
The newspaper draws on four articles by professional authors and researchers, each making a case for the positive influence that Hip-Hop and Rap have had on communities, youth, and social activism. I didn't write the arguments; I curated them, designed around them, and put them in a format that people would actually want to read.
The layout follows a traditional newspaper structure (masthead, columns, pull quotes, bylines), but the visual treatment pushes it in a different direction. Every image is covered in a magenta-and-orange gradient to intensify the mood and signal that this isn't a neutral publication. It has a point of view and it's not hiding it.
The back of the newspaper flips into a poster. A microphone stands before a concert crowd with the tagline: A Voice for the Voiceless. That line came from the research and interviews I conducted with my classmates about what this music means to them. The idea is simple: Hip-Hop and Rap have always been the way people without a platform speak up. The microphone is the symbol of that.
The goal was never just to inform, but to change how people think.