Creativity And Genre

             When one is given the task of producing creativity when given a task where there is a field with many choices, it is difficult to pick one topic and produce a creative product. In this blog I will detail my influences that led me to want to make a magazine about the various impacts of basketball on culture. 

The first influence was the Ted Talk titled The Theory of Creativity by Duncan Wardle, where he details the various benefits of creatively thinking outside the box. A term on which he thrusts a lot of emphasis is the ‘naive experts.’ He details an example where he asked experts to design a house in seven seconds, and they created a simple drawing that could have been drawn by a child, while a more creative individual who was not an expert created a more complex drawing of a house. I think this has some relation to the world of basketball and what I am trying to create because sometimes the common people have better takes than many experts, and many experts sometimes say things just to entertain, which is a vested interest to earn more revenue. 

Another influence to my topic was the New Introductions activity, and while I did not focus on the cultural influence of basketball for this assignment, it still forced me to think creatively on the topic I chose, and the things that I incorporate into my interest in this subject. I focused on cooking for this assignment, and I focused on the various influences that go into what I cook and how I like to impact people with my cooking. A third influence was the contents of the article "An Interview with Ron Beghetto: Subtle Nuances of Creativity in Learning and Life" and how Beghetto talks about creative self-efficacy, where we must move beyond the creative restraints of our imagination and act to break these creative barriers, and these experiences further help us to think outside the box of creativity. 

To better understand the industry of basketball magazines, I analyzed SLAM Magazine and the defunct ESPN: The Magazine. These magazines both use very creative tactics to attract readers, like using creative fonts for mastheads, in SLAM’s case. From these works, I would like to recreate the feeling that these can be experienced similarly by people of all audiences because the impact of basketball on culture applies to many areas. However, it is more difficult to attract readers in my case because I will not be able to attract the most marketable athletes in America, but I can use creative mastheads and main images to create an attractive cover, and use recency to further promote my magazine, because many readers have recency bias. An example of recency bias is judging a player off how they play currently as opposed to their career accomplishments, and to show recency bias would attract these more casual fans. I would like to differ from these magazines by using more historical athletes as opposed to only ones that are currently popular. For example, SLAM did not utilize the popularity of Michael Jordan because he was before their time, but I would like to use the most popular athletes throughout time. These magazines typically use imagery with bright lighting in their covers so the jersey colors and clothes of the athlete really pops, and they usually use white backdrops regardless of the color scheme of the player's attire.

Finally, my vision for my project mostly focuses on the culture of basketball. I would like to include the most eye-catching people in the industry for my covers based on their fashion sense and how they carry themselves, as well as utilizing the most influential players. These two categories consist of greats like Russell Westbrook, Allen Iverson, and Michael Jordan. I would also love to focus on individual impacts like how players have influenced the fashion industry and other topics like social justice.