6. Research for college magazine

As a practical task before the real thing, I was given the task of creating a college magazie, whether it be a seasonal special or specialised in a certain field in the cirriculum of the college. Before I could create this magazine, I had to create a questionnaire to capture the kind of audience I had to aim my college magazine to. I asked them in depth questions such as, what do they inspire to be in the future and where they see themselves. This then helped me to intepret what type of audience I would be aiming for.

Due to our gender being female, it was quite obvious that we eventually asked mainly girls to fill in our questionnaires due to them being an easier group of people to ask. This could make our magazine biased, due to it leaning towards a more female audience. From the questionnaire in general, we both discovered that a large group of people we asked fit into the social group of “emo”. Our audience also seems to be very social, due to them using the internet for mainly social networking sites, such as Facebook and MSN. Also, from the results of the questionnaire, we discoverd that our audience fits into the psychographic profile of Belonger, which is 40% of the US population.

Once I discovered what type of audience I was aiming for, I looked at past college magazine covers to help with inspirations. These are some of the following covers I looked at for research:

On the magazine college covers that I glanced at, I discovered that many of them displayed a mid-shot of a college student or a young person. This just displayed their head and shoulders, so I took that into account for my own college cover. They also had different fonts and sizes of the fonts, due to the masthead and other parts of the anchorage of text on the cover. They are bigger and bolder if they are important and not so when they are not as important. They also followed the conventions of a typical magazine cover with the use of a barcode, a date and price, therefore I knew I had to add these to my college cover to conform to the conventions.

Another part of the college magazine I had to create, was to accesorise my cover with a contents page. Once again, just like the covers I also researched contents pages:

From the magazine contents page I looked at, I took in a few details that I knew I had to use for my own contents to fit the conventions. Firstly, with the text there is a use of columns, to seperate the text out to make it easier, and to also organise the page. With page numbers and the titles of the pages, they are seperated by bold texts, along with sub-headings for different sections of the magazine. This also assists with the organisation. On one of the contests pages I also looked at, it included a letter from the editor of the magazine. I really like this part of the contents page personally, due to it being casual with its readers, therefore I took that as an influence of an idea for my contents.

MY COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Once I had gone and completed the research for my college magazine, I was influenced with many ideas of how the cover and contents page was going to look. On my front cover, I used a mid close-up shot, so it fit with the typical photography of a magazine cover. In the image it was of me smiling, so it hinted the positivity of being in a college such as Prior, so many other students will want to come due to the look of the cover. The fonts I used were Hobo Std (for the main titles) and Tekton Pro for other pieces of the text. They were good fonts to use due to them being readable but it also modernises the magazine so it attracts the correct audience of teenage college students. I used a colour scheme of three colours (red, black and white) because they all stood out amongst each other but there wasn't so many colours used that it made the cover and contents too busy and messy.

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