Student audiences are likely to find "gossip" and Celebrity-based magazines most appropriate for their age range.
"Closer" magazine features bold, sans serif font which use outstanding colours to catch the readers' attention. The magazines are generally quite cheap, which indicates that most of the money made for the magazine is through advertising. Students would benefit from the price of this magazine due to lack of funds. It is perceivable that "Closer" magazine is relatively down-market, mainly due to the bright coloured fonts used. There are only four colours used on the cover, and are yellow, black, white and pink. The captions contain bold, regular and italic fonts for emphasis on certain words. Font sizes vary, with the correlation of the importance of the story reflecting the size of font...thus the bigger the font, the more important the content is. I would suggest that Hedonists are most likely to choose this particular type of magazine, as its content is very current. The magazine cover features many bleeds, where text and images flow over the borders of the page. The magazine title is bled into captions and images, and many of the captions on the cover are printed at an angle.
Down-market magazines like this tend to scatter images and caption all over the page, connoting informality and a structural opposition to more up-market magazines. I can use this technique to attract a student audience to my forthcoming magazine.
Other magazines such as "Vibe" magazine focus on music-related content, using bold, contrasting colours such as black and yellow to attract their target audience. Despite the choice of colour being different to "Closer" magazine, "Vibe" manages to appeal to students too. The structural layout of images and captions contrasts greatly to "Closer" also, due to "Vibe" only using one main feature image, which is centred on the page. The ideas I can take from this example are the usage of thick, bold lettering with contrasting colours and a sans serif font. I would suggest that "Vibe" magazine attracts Hedonists as well as "Closer" magazine due to its current and light hearted content. The body of the cover is straight forward and clean cut; there are no bleeds of text or imagery, whereas "Closer" magazine feature many bleeds and look asif everything is crammed.
I believe that to make my magazine appeal to my target audience, I should incorporate ideas from both magazines above. Like 'Vibe' magazine, I will ensure that there are no bleeds of images or captions, and I will use bold, sans serif, coloured lettering, as I have found this to be most appealing to students, due to the informality of it. I think that yellow and black are appropriate colours, due to both being very unisex and bright- which will attract the target audience. I like the idea of neatly placing images and captions around the centre of the cover, and may therefore incorporate this into my design. I would like to include font with ascenders and descenders for captions, though my ideal title would be in Bold, capital, sans serif font. I plan to crop images to appropriate sizes, in order for them to correctly fit the cover. I'm likely to use fillers in order to avoid unnecessary spacial wastage, and add more important information about the magazines content. The splash on my front cover will be the most important feature of my magazine, and will be bright, clearly visible, and appropriate to the magazines intended content. Despite the popular magazine 'Vibe' using only 3 colours on the cover (black, yellow and white), I would like to incorporate more bright colours; preferably green and orange alongside black and white.
I would define my target audience as readers who appreciate recent college news, elements of college life, courses, driving, books, blogposts and more college-related information that would be useful to students' parents. They must also have a child/student who is aged between 16 and 20. I would suggest that my magazine would be appropriate for, and aimed at individuals who rate A-C1 on the jicnar scale. The target audience will ultimately be interested in their student's college life. My magazine will be upmarket and informative, though the colour scheme will be bright and attractive to potential readers.
After creating a few title ideas using Photoshop, we came up with a few designs.
When designing our magazine front cover, we decided to use the same font for our masthead as our captions. Like the layout in "Vibe" magazine, we put the main feature in the middle of the page, to make it the most visible item on the page. We also used the same colours featured on the shirt and cap in the image to colour our masthead. We felt that this would make the magazine colour scheme more effective, and to ensure that the colours don't clash. We thought that using different shaded of blue for the captions would compliment those on the shirt in the image. Using primary colours keep the font simple, but bright and appealing to our target audience. They are gender-neutral and bright enough to be seen from distance. We decided to make our masthead stretch completely horizontally across the top of the page to make it stand out. We used two extra, small images to feature on the front cover. We felt that our cover looked plain with only one image. The images are relevant to the content and do not bleed over the edges of the page. We used only 2 different sans serif fonts for our front cover, being Verdana and Ravie. For our contents page, we used Ravie again for the masthead, but used Verdana for the contents captions. For the contents headers, we used size 12 font and used capital letters only. For the strap lines we used size 12 font but ensured it was all lower case.
As planned, we used sans serif font for everything on both the masthead on our cover and the captions. The captions and fillers were relevant to the target audience as it is a college magazine. We spaced the captions neatly around our main feature as to maintain a more formal looking magazine; being appropriate for people rated A-C1 on the Jicnar Scale and to avoid caption/image bleeds which would make the cover look more informal and messy.
This is final main feature image we decided to choose to place in the centre of our magazine cover. We felt that this image was appropriate to the target audience.
The program we used to manipulate our main feature image was Photoshop, and using this program, we we were able to remove blemishes, crop the photo to our desired size, and rescale it. We also used an image of a Blackberry Smartphone, which we took ourselves and manipulated on Photo shop. That was the only other image on the cover that we used. We intended to keep images to a minimum as to prevent it looking cluttered. We added a barcode to the magazine cover to make it more realistic, and an issue number and price.
