Draft Contents design

Draft DPS design

Draft Cover Page Design

College magazine cover textual analysis

College magazine cover textual analysis

Here we have a college magazine called ‘College Lifestyle’, and this issue happens to be from summer 2009. It features a Jamaican dancehall deejay called Jeffery Campbell, also known as ‘Assassin’. Jeffrey is pictured holding a law, business and society book, along with others that we cannot see. The magazine uses various bright colours, including a splash of pink along with the main colour used being a green-yellow colour, the cover does also feature a dark black/ grey background. Around the edges of the cover we find a variety of different articles that all happen to be the kinds of things that students will be interested.

When looking into what colours we find on the page, we see that there is black background with a light shining in the centre, giving it a brighter feel. In contrast to the dark background, we have a bright green/ yellow coloured text, which stands out massively from the background. We do also have a pink splat to the right hand side of the page which again stands out from the darker background, and this leads us to read what is on the splat which happens to be an advertisement for paintballing, which relates to the nature of the splat.

When we look into what we find on the magazine, we see Jeffery immediately, and this is because he is featured directly in the middle of page, and this is done to draw attention to him, and draw in possible customers because he may be seen as quite a cool person, who people like, and seeing him on the cover may make them want to pick it up and read it, which is something that all magazine producers want. Jeffery is wearing a black jacket, with black jeans, a white t-shirt along with a rather large silver chain. What he is wearing would normally be considered quite ‘trendy’ and ‘cool’, which is something that the generation in which the magazine is aimed at can relate to. He also happens to be looking directly down the camera which may be done in an attempt to connect the reader to magazine, and again make them want to pick it up and have a read.

When we take a closer look at some of the feature articles, we find that they are all very relatable for teens and general college students, just from a first glance, which again is something in which they have done purposely in an attempt to get college students to want to pick it up and read it.  

All of the fonts that they have used here are very simple, sans serif fonts, making it very easy to read, and even from a distance, the feature headlines are rally rather easy to read, this is probably helped along with the fact that the colours go along well with the background .

Contents Page Textual Analysis - Q

Magazine Publisher Case Study

Target Audience Mood board

Advertisers Mood board

Colour & Font mood board

Double Page Spread Textual Analysis - Q

Survey Monkey Questionnaire & Responses

Double Page Spread Textual Analysis - MOJO

Contents Page Textual Analysis - VIBE

The Magazine Industry

Mixmag Magazine Case Study

Construction Schedule

Construction Schedule 

Week 1	Compose drafts of my Cover, DPS and Contents on Photoshop
Week 2	Final decision of fonts, colours, layout, model and location
Week 3	Write out my article for my double page spread
Week 4	Take photos for the front cover, DPS and contents
Week 5	Begin to produce Cover Page
Week 6	Finalise Cover Page
Week 7	Begin to produce DPS
Week 8	Finalise DPS
Week 9	Begin to produce Contents
Week 10	Finalise Contents
Week 11	Touch up Cover, DPS and Contents to get them to a professional standard
Week 12	Complete all evaluations necessary
Week 13	Upload all necessary files to blogger

Original Idea Statement

Original Idea Statement

Within this small document, I will be going through the reasoning behind my decision on what I have decided to create for my own magazine. First of all, I have decided that I am going to create a magazine based around the electronic/ dance style of music.  

Within this magazine, I need to make sure I connect with the audience in the right way, and that they are going to be drawn into what the magazine is going to be about. This will mean using the right kind of colour schemes, the right kind of writing and the right kind of imagery. This is all very important because if my audience is going to see my magazine, I want to make sure that they are going to want to look at it more, and then read into it.
My main inspiration behind this decision is the magazine known as ‘mixmag’. This magazine claims to be the ‘biggest dance music and clubbing magazine’ available, and with this being set within the same genre as what I plan to do, it is going to be massively helpful towards knowing what I need to put onto my own cover.                                                                                                                                           

Textual Analysis - 'Mixmag'

Textual Analysis - 'Classic fM'

Textual Analysis - 'MOJO'

College Magazine Draft Cover & Contents

Analysis of questionnaire results

Analysis of questionnaire results

Our questionnaire was completed in order to find out what sort of thing we should be aiming to produce for making our own college magazine. The questions in which we asked were thought of in order to get us this kind of information.

The first thing that we asked people was ‘What would you like the magazine to involve?’, followed by a series of different options that they could choose as many as they wanted to from. The top three results in which we took in were gaming, followed closely by general college information and then music. This gives us a general idea what people will be interested in reading about in a college magazine and what we should think about putting into ours.

We then asked people whether they would be interested in contributing towards the magazine itself, and we got quite a split result of yes, no and maybe, with ‘no’ coming just out on top. With this in mind, we know that there are a few people out there that would be willing to help us with the project, but we will need to do more of it ourselves.

Then we asked what people would be willing to pay for the magazine. The vast majority of people went for the option of £2-£3, over half in fact. This again gives us valuable information that we can use when thinking about what to do for when we are in the process of creating our own college magazine.

We then decided that we wanted to find out how often we need to publish it, and we gave the options weekly, fortnightly, monthly and termly. Weekly came out on top by quite a bit, followed by monthly, fortnightly and then termly. This was important for us to know because we didn’t want to be making the magazine too often, or not enough, getting the results back for this allows us to get a general idea of when to publish it.

After that we wanted to find out how people wanted the magazine to look colour wise. 63% of people said that they wanted the magazine to be full of bright, eye catching colours opposed to it being neutral, pale colours.

We then wanted to find how long people thought the articles should be. We gave them the options double page, full page or half page. We found that half page and double page were quite close votes wise, but whole page got the most votes by a long run, meaning we now know how much we should be thinking about writing when producing articles for the magazine.

The idea of having competitions in the magazine then popped up. We wanted to know whether people would be interested in having competitions within the magazine, the answers we got back were very close, 58% of people said yes and then 42% said no, so this isn't too conclusive on whether we should do competitions, but we get a general idea that more people tend to be interested in the magazine if there were competitions.

Then we decided to find out where people would want to buy the magazine from. All of the answers we took in were very close but library tipped the rest closely followed by online and reception, with canteen being at the bottom of people’s choice. We are now know whereabouts we should think about putting the magazine for when we want to sell it.

The final question we asked was whether people currently read any other magazines. We got results of 63% saying no, and the rest (37%) saying yes. This gives us an idea of how many people actually read magazines already, allowing us to see how many people we are aiming to probably reading our own. 

Graphs for our Results