04 Begining the college magazine

Recently in media the focus has been on creating the college magazine. The front cover and contents page were those that needed to be produced. On the contents page it displays what will be featured in the magazine. I developed this to suit the needs of the readers. The questionnaire helped me to establish an idea of what kind of people the audience would be aiming towards, therefor influencing what went into the magazine. I included college based features, music and fashion, as this reflects the comments that I recieved.

For the cover I researched existing front covers to see which styles existed, aiming to see what would be suitable for my cover. I found out that generally the styles were quite plain with just one figure with either a positive or thoughtful pose on the cover. I thought these covers just blended in a bit so aimed to make mine more colourful to stand out more and make college appear to be more of a fun activity.

With regards to the cover, I displayed the fact that there would be a free chocolate bar on offer. I decided to do this because it was a common trend within my results that free gift would encourage people to buy the magazine. Chocolate was what I chose as it would appeal to both genders, who I am directing my magazine towards, so it wouldnt exclude anyone. The main image on my cover is a medium close up of me, pointing directly at the camera. I believe this is effective because it grabs attention, looking as though I am adressing the potential buyer. It also fits into my title, look forward, as it is about personally looking towards the future and where their studies will take them.

03 Background information on audience

Practicing photographic technique

I decided to change my chosen music scene to indie, as this is the kind of music I listen to and have an interest in for use on the music magazine.
We are now making a questionaire and getting the results to help develop a college magazine, then we will eventually make a music magazine. I intend to create an even more complex questionaire to find out about my indie audience on the music magazine which will be targeted specifically towards people who would be part of my audience. These results will help us find out about the needs of the audience. The questionaire explores a range of different areas of life including fashion, music taste, income and social grades, interests, age, gender, including much more. By conducting the college magazine interview I can to the conclusion that Look Forward readers are students of the college Prior Pursglove. They are generally teenagers, around the age of 16 to 18 who are very outgoing and socially active with a wide range of interests, everything from sports to cookery. They listen to varied genres of music but the majority are poptastic. The females idolise Beyonce and Cheryl Cole as their stle icons, and the guys admire the likes of Ne Yo and Justin Timberlake. The readers fit into a comfortable social status, enjoying a life with many oppurtunities,which they, or more likely their parents, are able to fund.
For the college magazine front cover we needed a medium close up head shot. This could be done by using props and different photographic techniques such as the angle from which it was taken. The photo is then to be edited into a front cover on photoshop. I got practice for photography by instructing my model on which way to pose and using props.
We also researched ideology which meant we looked at politics and the beliefs of different political parties to explore their ideology. An ideology is a world view and overall way of looking at things showing a system of values, attitudes and beliefs which an individual, group or society holds to be true. This is important when producing the magazine because it needs to be aimed towards a group and the ideology they share needs to be considered so the views shown are suitable.
The way that media feeds us information was also explored. This was by looking at the hypodermic shringe theory which means when the media inject us with the information.

02 Research for audience

Up to now we have been studying representation in the media. The term refers to the construction of aspects of reality such as people, places, objects, events cultural identities and other concepts being shown as a certain way in the mass media. This will help as research for the ideas behind my audience and what appeals to them and how certain things in my project should be presented. We've looked at pictures of famous people and wrote connatation and denotation on them to see how they are presented. Its also given me to use photoshop for the first time where we designed our own perfume advertisement, choosing background, perfume bottle and model.
It's helped me further analyse pictures as we wrote a short essay about a fashion photograph. Stereotyping is another thing that we have covered, how certain groups are labeled. We went further into this by researching into a typically stereotyped music group, which will help for the magazine task, my choice was the emo music scene. This is a highly stereotyped music scene where by most emos are labelled as promoting death and other disturbing activities. However this was not to my personal preferance so I then went on to research indie rock music, which I eventually decided on.

01-Introduction

The main project was to produce a music magazine, however to assist with the production of this and start work on the music magazine we did practice task with making a college magazine. This would give photoshop practice, use of the cameras and help us to be able to develop this and improve our skills onto the music magazine.
To get some audience research I interviewed this group to find out what would capture their attention and explored existing indie magazines, such as NME. I intended to focus on the group of the indie music scene, which would be of a more rock based genre. Around this information from my niche market I could decide on the type of photographs, design styles, colour schemes fonts and graphics that they would be attracted to which would develop a house style. My college magazine is to be a more bright and simple style whereas I developed this once I was more familiar with the process for my music magazine onto a more detailed style with a dark and fiery colour scheme to appeal to the rockers in my target audience.