In the 16-year history of Vibe, the magazine was nominated for eight ASME awards: one for Design, three for Photography and four for General Excellence. 2002 was the only year Vibe took home an elephant statuette, beating down The New Yorker, Gourmet, Jane and Wired to win General Excellence in the 500,000 - 1 million circulation bracket. Did I mention I was the executive editor at the time?

Part of my job was to manage special projects and the Juice Issue, our September issue, was our annual tribute to all things fabulous in hip-hop. When I started to conceptualize the project the only thing I had to work with was Outkast because the duo was confirmed for the cover story. Outkast stepped onto the music scene in 1994 with the CD, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. By 2001 they had released three more CDs and were beginning to gain notoriety with mainstream music fans. Their new-found popularity was a function of the "southern-playalistic" image — two dope boys in a Cadillac — that had been native to their persona since their '94 debut.

Throughout 2001 the word, "player" was huge in urban vernacular. People were always using phrases like "Play on, playa," "I'm not a player, I just crush a lot," and "Don't hate the player, hate the game." Before long, I had 12 player-themed sidebars scribbled on a pad and shortly after I devised a plan to weave the word and its slanguistic meaning throughout the issue.

The result was a 254-page behemoth — one of the thickest issues in the magazine's history. It included 150 pages of advertisements (priced at $35K per ad) from the likes of Prada, Gucci, Nike, Toyota, ESPN, Visa, the U.S. Army, Motorola and Coca-Cola.

When it came time to put together our ASME proposal for General Excellence we submitted the September, November and December issues. Like the print industry in 2010, the rest is history.

click the image below to view pages from the 2001 Juice Issue