10.8.8 Magazine
A student magazine we started in 2021, in my second year, out of pure spite. Made by students, starring students, free to read. Four editions later, it's the reason 10.8.8 Africa exists.
It started out of spite
In 2021 a campus magazine came out at FUT Minna, the first of its kind. Engineering students already had a reputation for being unfashionable, all books and grades, even though plenty of us were into creative things. The magazine's models came from every faculty except engineering. Not one of us.
Students are fiercely loyal to their faculties, so we took it personally. Our answer: a magazine made for and with engineering students only, and the coolest thing on campus. I started reaching out to creative people I knew in the faculty, with my friend Temi, and most of them said yes.
Why 10.8.8
Every engineering student at FUT Minna knew these numbers: the credits you needed in first year to stay in engineering.
A bit of everything
It was our first time doing anything remotely professional, so my role was everything: creative direction above all, plus editing, writing, scouting models, directing shoots and promoting each edition. I was learning marketing from scratch at the same time and put it straight to use.
I worked with a designer on the first edition and sat in on design from the start. By the third edition I was designing pages myself, in Canva.
Four editions, and counting
Vol. 1
5,000downloads, roughly. Engineering only. Shared so widely as a PDF that we couldn't track it all.
Valentine's
7,000downloads, roughly. Everything themed around love. Our biggest edition.
ASUU Strike
200paid downloads, about. Made while everyone was home during the strike, and our one paid experiment. It didn't work.
Gen Z / Alté
3,000+downloads, and better tracked. Fashion, culture and the alté wave.
centric
edition
Next up
In production. We may recast and reshoot it for the new year with more of the student audience.
The Afrocentric edition
A first look at what we're working with: the shoot for our fifth edition, with students in front of and behind the camera.
More on @10.8.8magazine ↗A story, not a stack of pages
Pick a concept
The team meets and lands on a theme, like Valentine's or Gen Z alté, and everything that follows takes that vibe.
Open the call for writers
Writers come from the team, the community and the public. Public writers submit articles and we pick the best. We mix tones and strengths so no two editions read the same.
Shoot to match the words
The shoots are built around the articles, so every picture tells the same story as the words. We scout models, sometimes from the community or the team, and bring in our photographers and videographers plus outsourced ones from our network.
Design it
Our designers sit in the concept meetings, so they know the articles and the shoots before the files land in a shared Drive. Then they get to work.
Release it free
A free PDF, promoted to students wherever they are.
How it outgrew itself
The first edition went viral on campus, even with students outside engineering. We'd kept the team anonymous for an air of mystery, but the more I learned about marketing, the less that made sense. We needed to show up and grow.
We started the magazine to give students a platform to express themselves, in whatever creative space they were in. Everything we make involves students and Gen Z at every point, down to a trailer scored with music by a student.
Students get asked for experience when they apply for jobs, but where are they meant to get it? As a writer, photographer, videographer, editor or designer, having something like this to show is real proof of work.