Planning my College Magazine

A large part of the research I did for my magazine was about target audience. I did this using a questionnaire containing nine questions that would help me discover the kind of things the people in my magazines target audience would be looking for. The first question asked the prices people would be willing to pay. 61% of the people asked said they would pay £1 so this is the price I put on the cover of my magazine. The next question determined how often people would like the magazine to have a new issue. Of the people asked 60% said they’d prefer it to be monthly magazine so on the cover I put Oct 2009 which implies it is monthly as there are no specific dates. The third question asked what content people would like to see in the magazine and they were then asked to tick four of the 19 choices that followed. The top six were local gig reviews, game reviews, sports, movie reviews, jokes and college news so I used these as my sell lines on my front cover. For my contents I included the previous six things but also a further seven things which were high on the list of things people wanted to see. The fourth question asked what type of music genre people liked most. The top one was indie and although I haven’t really been able to show this if I were to go into detail on any of the musical elements of the magazine I would ensure that while they were varied they still contained a lot of indie band references. The fifth question was an open question which asked people what their hobbies were. There were a lot of answers to this however it seemed that playing instruments and sporting activities consistently appeared so I ensured my magazines cover was musically themed and that sport was included as a sell line. The sixth question asked whether the magazine should have a lot of writing or more pictures. The answer to this overall was that there should be an equal amount, which I think my magazine products achieved. The seventh question was who should be on the front; bands, students or teachers. The majority of people said students so on my cover is a medium close up of a student. I also included some smaller pictures of a band so that my cover appealed to people who hadn’t voted for students. The eighth question discussed the tone of the magazine, should it be serious, jokey or a mixture. The majority of people wanted it to be a mixture and so I kept this in mind when planning my cover and contents page. The final question asked people what other magazines they regularly read. This was an open question so there were lots of responses. However the most popular type of magazine seemed to be musical, such as Kerrang, Metalhammer etc. This is another reason I gave my cover a musical theme.

I then researched six existing magazine covers. I looked briefly at all of them before choosing three to study more closely. With these three I analysed elements of the covers design and layout such as the colours, masthead style, image size and placement, background, text and various other things. From this I learnt many things such as colours that are eye catching, how the masthead is usually positioned and how many sell lines to include. I then choose the cover I found most interesting and uploaded it to Flickr. I was then able to analyse it even further by adding tags to it. This helped me because I was able to look really closely to the covers design and take the elements I liked from it forward into my own work.

When planning my cover the first thing I decided on was its theme. I decided to make it musically orientated because a lot of the things people wanted to see in the magazine were to do with music. In the background I wanted to put an amp and then in the foreground have a medium close up of a person’s face and their arm. I then started to think of a title. I decided on ‘Micawber’ because it means one who is poor but lives in optimism of a better fortune. I thought this embodied the stereotypical student who is poor but is getting qualifications to get a better job and a better fortune. I then looked at fonts for the title and decided on a serif font similar to the kind used on Marshall Amps. Looking at the design I already had and the research I’d done I put the masthead at the top of the cover. Then under this I wrote ‘The Experience’ in the same font. After this I took the information from the audience questionnaires and decided on the sell lines I wanted on the cover. I put these to the right and above the main image. I then decided to add two smaller photographs which depicted one of the sell lines. For the contents I looked at the contents page of an edition of ‘Men’s Fitness’ and changed it so it fitted the information and style of my magazine.