Mood Boards + Research

Fonts

  

For the font, I was thinking about going for something that could found on other popular magazines. I preferred the bolder styles of font and I thought that if I were to use a more thinner font, I would use all capital letters in the title. By researching different font types, it has helped me to better understand the conventions of a magazine cover that is aimed at a mass audience and to choose the right font that would fit my genre of magazine.

Artist Genre

 

 

These are the kinds of artists that inspired what my model would look/be like. The fact that I had chosen a pop based magazine, I wanted to base my artist on well known chart singers, such as Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, all artists that would attract a younger audience. All of these singers are also mostly pop singers, which is what my artists would be similar to. This research also helped me to form content for my double page spread, by finding out what kind of questions these artists are asked and the way they go about answering them, helped me to put my questions together and to then form a response.

Location

 For the location, I wanted to visit mainly outdoor places so I could use a natural background without having to edit it. Even though many of the places I wanted to shoot looked nice. However from this research of different locations, it became clear to me that if I wanted to have the main focus of the magazine cover on my model, a noisy background would take away the effect of the model. For this reason I decided to still use an outdoor background, but in a way that it was subtle and would not take the audiences attention away from the model.

Music Magazine Covers

Many of the magazine front covers I researched were pop, or loosely based around pop culture. One thing that helped influence my final product is the way pop magazines layout their cover lines. I noticed that the main cover line would generally involve the biggest story (almost always about the featured music artist) and the other cover lines would give more insight into the rest of the magazine. One other thing from the research that helped my decisions on how to  make my front cover, was the position of the title. In my first magazine daft the title was a small size and spaced out, but after looking at other pop magazines, I realised a more effective and professional looking title would be bold and large, either in front of the model or behind.

Layout Ideas

Reader Profile

Demographics

Gender:                          Female
Age:                               17
ABC:                             C1/DE
Occupation:                   Student/Part time Job
Disposable Income:      £100
Education:                     Sixth Form/A Levels
                                      Media
                                      Politics
                                      English
                                      Psychology
Nationality:                   British

Psychographics

A "normal" 17 year old A level Sixth Form
student who is interested in music as well
as her hobbies such as photography and sports.
When she spends time alone, this person will
listen to mainstream pop music, but is open to
finding out about new artists other may not
have heard of. When she spends time with her
friends, they like to go to the cinema to watch
new movies or to the theatre to watch live
productions of well known performances.
She enjoys a lot of things to do with art and creativity.
She plays a few instruments and likes to paint
in her spare time, when she is not doing school work.

Likes: Good music and films, shopping,
playing instruments, spending time with friends,
CD collecting.

Dislikes: Racism, injustice, bad music
and films, people shouting in public.

                               

Magazine Questionnaire

Thinking about my magazine, I made a questionnaire to find out about what kind of features and components my target audience would want to see. I conducted 20 questions that would help to give me an idea on what I would put in my own magazine, and how I would construct it so that it would fit to the expectations of the readers.

 

Ages

After doing some research, the main age group I was focusing on were 15-19 year olds. However as I progressed in handing out the questionnaires, I found that the majority of the people answering my questions were 16 and 17 year olds. From the pie chart, I can see how out of the 21 people who filled

out my questionnaire, the majority were these to ages. This will now help me to focus on the kind of language, and way I will construct my magazine in order to appeal to the correct age range. 



 

 

Circulation

One thing I wanted to find out from my questionnaire, is how often people would want to buy my magazine. The reason I asked this question was because I would have an idea on how much content the magazine would need, for example, if I was updating the readers on the past week, month or year. Looking at the results of this question, it became clear that 10 people out of the 21 would be interested in buying the magazine monthly. From these results, I will be able to keep in mind that in the magazine, the content will be about music that has been around, or made an impact in the past month.

Magazine Genre

Another very important question I asked in my questionnaire was: What is your favourite music genre. By asking this question, it would help me to use the results from the age question and the results from this to put together the ideal magazine. After collecting the results from this question, I can see that "pop" is the most popular genre. Amongst the 21 people who filled out the questionnaire, 18 of them fell under the ages of 16 and 17, from this I can put together that the majority od people this age like to listen and read about pop music.

 

 

The Magazine Name

The last major question I wanted to ask was about what I could call my magazine. Out of the 4 options (Tune Magazine, Ballad, Key Magazine and Root Magazine) the most popular name for the magazine was "Ballad". Since over half of the people I asked chose this name, I have decided to consider using this as my title because it was the most liked and being one word, it will stand out and look good.

 

 

 Other Questions I asked

As well as these questions that I put into pie charts, I asked more that I believed would help me to put together my magazine. One question that I thought would be important to ask was "What would you want to see on the front cover?" The reason I asked this question was so I could decide how I could construct the front cover of the magazine. The most popular answer out of the options I gave, was a celebrity. This will help me to decide what kind of picture I want to put on the front of the magazine.

 

One other question I asked was about the layout. I wanted to know whether people liked the conventional magazine cover or wanted to see something more unconventional and different to what most magazines are like. The most frequent answer was conventional, this will help me to design the cover in a conventional way that most people are used to.