Before I started to plan out my final front cover, there was a lot of research done by Jack and myself. We looked at an array of college magazines and you can see a few of our choices further down on this Blog. After looking at other magazines and seeing which looked the most professional and eye-catching, we started to have a look at what we could bring into our own magazine and what would increase the overall look of the front cover. As you can see, the Masthead has been split into three fonts. 'Grades' is in a thick and bold font, with a thick black outline. This is a Serif font and which denotes a college theme as often in American, college based media you will see this style of font. The 'Babes' is in a love heart, graffiti font and denotes the youthful love scene as the shape reminds the reader of the sweets 'Love Hearts' which are primarily eaten by children/teenagers. The 'Grades' font was on one of the magazines we used for research and seemed like a very strong and easy to read font that would go well with our magazine. We had a look at one magazine where the whole page was packed with information and was really full of coverlines and showed just how full the magazine was. I thought that this was perharps a little too over the top so decided to take the idea of a packed magazine and calm it down a little. I think I have achieved this by filling up a lot of the page with information and coverlines of what the reader can expect in the magazine. This is an example of choosing a convention on another magazine and developing the idea into my own. I think this cover challenges usual college magazines because it is not boring or focused around college primarily, it has articles on girls, a large part of a male teenagers life, and also things like Gym memberships and good clothes to wear to look 'cool' in school. These are all large parts of college life and do not centre around the work as many would.
When I was planning i also had to choose a target audience for my magazine. We had been specified that the mag' was to be aimed at college students, the rest was up to us. I decided that I would like to do one for mainly a Male market as I don't think this has been done much before in college magazines. The age range I decided on was a range of 15-21 year olds, I chose such a broad age range as i wanted this magazine to be read by many more people than the college students as i expect it to be open to more people. If a 16 year old takes this magazine home I want it to appeal to the slightly younger and slightly older market. e.g. Brothers, cousins who are maybe not students.
I made this magazine specifically for the age range i chose by thinking about the type of Fonts to be used, colours included, content of the magazine, coverlines, pictures etc. I think i have achieved the youthful look as when you glance at the front cover, you can immediately tell it is designed for a younger audience as all the models on the front cover look like they are teenagers, the colours are very vibrant and the font used is quite a smooth and fun looking font which you would not expect in an adult magazine dealing with politics etc.
The colours used on the front cover are almost fluorescant ranging from Lime Green to Bright Pink. I chose this style because most of the successful college magazines have bright colours and attractive writing, the designs that i considered to be quite boring were the ones that only stuck to Black, White and Navy sometimes. I wanted the coverlines and masthead to really stand out from the page and make people look twice. I have also included a 'free gym session' offer on the front cover which would make a lot of people buy and read the magazine, i think that looking good and being healthy is a big bit of college life as this will help with getting the girls and also sports clubs. Some magazines in my research offered an insentive to buy but most were to do with the cinema and things to help you study. I didn't find one offering a free gym session.
To create this front cover I used Photoshop predominantly. Whilst planning I used the internet and also a few magazines that my media teacher had in the classroom, I have progressed in my ability to successfully research as i have picked up tips on how to get good results from search engines such as Google. The biggest progression in technology for me was learning how to use Adobe Photoshop on a basic level. Once i had taken a few pictures using a full size lensed camera and decided which ones I wanted to be on the front cover of the magazine it was only a matter of editing these and arranging them in the places they were to be in corresponding with the plans below. I would say that the two most useful tools for me in Photoshop were the change lighting tool and also the Stamp tool. The lighting helped to create the bright and youthful feeling which wasnt captured with natural lighting and the Stamp tool was useful to make the models skin smooth and unblemished. The lassoo tool on Photoshop was useful as it let me take parts out of pictures and move them around as single layers, this allowed an overlap of images and made the whole front page look much better. I have also learnt more about creating a blog using Blogspot (Blogger). I have some past experience with a personal blog but this has helped me in understanding how to layout a blog and upload images successfully.
