Creativity & Genre

Creativity is extremely important when embarking upon a new endeavor in a field ripe with choices. Creativity is what helps you stand out and decide what path you want to go on. In the Theory of Creativity Ted Talk the speaker talked about always having a notepad with you to write down ideas you come up with. I can resonate with this because sometimes late at night I will think of ideas that I believe to be particularly good and will type them on my phone to remember later. To add on, in the Introduction activity I really had to think and get a lot more creative then any old assignment at school. When I made a correlation between the app Among Us and my desire to problem solve and be a detective of sort it made me realize just how creative I could get when describing myself. This ties in with the portfolio project and magazine because I will have to really expand my creativity if I want to be able write fascinating articles that people will be interested by in this day and age. Additionally, in the article titled, “An Interview with Ron Beghetto: Subtle Nuances of Creativity in Learning and Life” Shaughnessy talks about creative self-efficacy and how it is “a specific type of creative self-confidence that helps shape more global beliefs about our creative abilities and identity…(self efficacy) “is developed by taking creative action, making progress, receiving honest and supportive (i.e., improvement focused) feedback and encouragement from trusted others, observing relatable people creatively perform on tasks.” This explains how creativity isn’t something that you can easily utilize. There are multiple steps to using it properly.

My vision for my portfolio project is a magazine that embodies me. I want this magazine to have my creativity on display in all of its’ elements. An example of this would be the Sports Illustrated magazine with Steve Cannella and Ryan Hunt. Their repeating articles in every issue that include Who's Hot, Who's Not, and Faces in the Crowd are what define them, and you can see their creative input in the editing of these articles. What excites me about my chosen genre is how I can make my main topic all about something that I love and enjoy while also being able to branch off from it and talk about many subtopics within. For example, the Slam magazine with their editors Cory Johnson and Dennis Page. The entire magazine is devoted to basketball and basketball only. Additionally, they include many different subtopics and levels of basketball such as high school, college, and professional. I hope to be able to emulate this in my magazine. However, I would like to make sure my articles differ from each other slightly and do not talk about the same things in different subtopics.