Front Cover Potential Images

Here are some potential images for my front cover of my magazine. Images will also be considered for the contents page and double page spread.

NB. images may appear more blurry in this video.

Conventions, Producer and Target Audience Essay

Here is the marked version of my conventions, producer and target audience essay. All feedback is positive and I am pleased with the outcome.

Potential Images

Here is a video compilation of the images taken at my first photo shoot. These are a few of the selected shots  including me and local band, The Maverick Rejects. After discussing thoughts with my lecturer, I have decided that a new photoshoot needs to be completed as the overall quality of these images has been worsened by the interference of too much high key lighting. These have however given me an idea of what kind of poses work and what don't which will help for any future photoshoots. Also, I will be using some of these images for the other pages in my magazine- the contents page and double page spread, as it was agreed that these images weren't of high enough quality for my front cover.
N.B. The clarity of images may have been affected in this video.

Colours

This is the image that I have potentially chosen as my main cover image for the front cover of my magazine. I have decided to use the colours featured on the model (pinks, blues and black ((hair pin))) as a house style to be maintained through out my magazine.

After gathering results from my survery, I found that blue and pink were the most popular colour choices amongst my target audience. Therefore, I want to incorporate these colours into my magazine to attract my audience and please their preferences.

Below are the stock colours I will be using, but I will also be experimenting with different shades of these colours when I come to create my product.

As previously mentioned, blue was the second most popular colour amongst my target audience. I think this is because there are lots of shades of blue and the colour has many different connotations. eg. light blue= the sky. Also, boys tend to like the colour blue, and a lot of girls enjoy some element of a "tom-boy-ish" lifestyle, be it with what the watch or through a colour. Not all girls enjoy the stereotypically girly pink colour and might find this as a less eccentric substitute.

I have chosen black as a colour that will be used only to highlight important elements of my magazine, such as an outline for text as as some textual elements that need to be noticed more so than other text.

Pink was voted the most popular colour in my survery amongst my target audience. This colour has an immediate connotation of girls and fun- something that my magazine most definitely focuses on! I will be using this colour as It will please my audience, it being their favourite colour and to help convey the fun message across my magazine that I want.

Using these colours means that I am using a three shade colour palette, a typical convention of most magazines. As I want to achieve the most professional look that I can for my product, using conventions of professional magazines is something that I am looking to do.

Yellow Research

I asked my facebook research group what they thought about the colour yellow being used in a teen pop magazine as I feel that it might be an interesting colour to add to my colour palette.

As you can see, everyone selected "yes", they like the colour yellow and feel that it would work in a teen pop magazine. Additionally, some helpful comments were made stating how the colour yellow makes my target audience feel. This has been extremely useful as I can now incorporate yellow into mty colour palette.

Fonts

I have chosen 4 fonts of which I am considering using for the front cover of my magazine. These potential fonts may also be used throughout the magazine and are chosen from website "Dafont.com". However, these may not be the fonts that I use in my final product. Here are the selected fonts and I have highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of each.

I liked this font becauase it was bold and had a quriky look to it. This would ensure that my audience could clearly see the font and it would grab their attention immediately as a front cover font. However, I believe that the font is to "cartoon-esque" and doesn't quite convey a "girly" enough identity across to the audience.

I liked this font the most out of the other font selections that I made. I believe that the font has the bold quality that I need to capture the reader's attention, but the rounded edges of the font connote a "friendly, bubbly" feel to it, something that is important for my readers to feel. I am considering using this as my front cover mast head font as I believe that I can play around with it in Photo Shop to create a perfect, stand out font style.

This font is one that I may use more for the contents page or enigma codes rather than a main sell line etc. I think this because it isn't bold enough to capture the readers attention as a main sell-line, but has that relatable quality of handwriting for other textual elements that the reader may want to read for further detail.

This font is one that I may use more for the contents page or enigma codes rather than a main sell line etc. I think this because it isn't bold enough to capture the readers attention as a main sell-line, but has that relatable quality of handwriting for other textual elements that the reader may want to read for further detail.

Survey Results

I asked what the prefered genre of music was to 15 people within my target audience age range and was pleased with the reaction of 12 girls saying "teen pop" was their prefered music taste. Obviously this is big supporting evidence for my magazine to be appropriate to my target audience and, as some answers came back with "indie" as a preference, that enables me to create quirky elements to my magazine in an "individual" style to suit different members of my target audience.

By asking what kind of artist is prefered by my target audience, I have been educated in a sense that I now have an insight into what kind of musicians I should include in my magazine. The result with the greatest outcome was a female artist. Although not specified who, examples of this could be Rihanna, Beyonce, Cher Lyyod, Cheryl Cole etc. This has now confirmed for me that I will be using a single female artist as the dominant feature of my magazine as the proved the most popular. As boy band ranked second favourite, I will therefore aim to include images of a boy band in my magazine to attract the girls to the "attractive" males that I will use. 

From previous research, prices between £1.50 and £2 seemed the most popular price to pay on a weekly basis for a magazine. I then produced a price of £1.70 and asked the people in question whether they would be willing to pay this price and 87% of people said they would pay this. Thanks to this feedback, I have decided to settle the price of £1.70 as a fixed price for the magazine. It is crucial to have an achievable price for my magazine as due to the young age of my readers, accessing money is more difficult due to not having jobs etc.

 From my previous research, I discovered that the vast majority of people in my target audience would be more inclined to buy a magazine if it had a free gift. Therefore, I decided to ask which kind of gift they would prefer. As you can see, posters are the most popular gift option which has told me that I should include posters as my free gift offer. I will utilise this information when creating my magazine and may advertise this on my front cover.

 I asked what was their favourite colour from the colours that I highlighted and the colour pink came back the most popular. This was an expected result as pink is a sterotypically girly colour and was interested to see that the other colours that ranked were blue, yellow and purple(other). I will ergo ensure that these colours are featured in my magazine and will use pink as a main attractive feature to entice my audience by featuring their overall favourite colour.

With this question, I wanted to establish what kind of things my audience liked to read about so that I could influence my contents page with this information. Music articles were the most prefered, which conforms to my criteria through the double page spread I am required to make. Secondly, boys and celebrities came joint second followed by fashion. As all options got votes, this has given me the instinct to feature these articles in my contents page so that everyone that reads my magazine gets a varied experience from the different types of articles that would feature. By doing this, I will be reaching out to a wider audience and not just music fans.

 I felt that it was important to ask how often the audience purchase music so that I got an insight into how enthusiastic they are about actively buying music. In addition, as the greatest response was that 53% of the audience buy music every week, this highlights their keen interest in music, but also allows me to feature free downloads of songs in my magazine as they will be used.

 Again, this question was asked to establish whether listing a horoscope/agony aunt section in my contents page would be approved by my audience and how many people would actually read it. From the results, it has shown me that including a horoscope/agony aunt section would be an attractive feature to my magazine and I will therefore ensure that this is included in my contents page.

This question was asked to establish how inspirational the models featured in my magazine are. Results show that 93% of the people in question idolise figures in magazines and this now means that when making my magazine, I should try to show the figures in the best possible light. This can be expressed further in my double page spread when interviewing my "celebrity" featured on the front cover. For this, I will try to encourage positive responses and cause no offense to anyone reading.

This was an important question to ask because this would influence how I place all of my conventions together when creating my magazine. The result was 13-2 with 13 people prefering an image led magazine. This result conforms to my expectation as my audience is a younger generation, I expected them to prefer to gain more from looking at images rather than reading a lot of text. I will therefore have to try and incorporate this into my front cover and contents page, and specifically my double page spread (something made for reading). I will try and create a double page spread that is visually exciting as well as informative in its role.

By asking this question, I was trying to establish whether the buyers of my magazine would feel that there is a gap on the market for a teen pop magazine. Only one person voted for no, but 14 others said that they felt there was room and it would be something they'd want to buy. This helps to ensure that I have a captive audience and can create a new product, different from any other that there may be on the market.

I felt that asking this question would enable me to include an address, most probably on my contents page for the audience to write to should they so want to. A large amount of people said that yes, they would write into the magazine with letters and photos etc. From these results, I intend on including an address and I feel by doing this, I make my magazine more dimensional and interactive which would encourage regular readers to continue reading as they gain that level of interaction and encourage new readers also, as they feel that they too could be part of the magazine.