Audience research online

Questions:
1) What attracts you to the front cover of a magazine?
2) What type of music are you into?
3) How often do you read magazines?
4) Why do you read magazines?

Answer 1:
1) Pictures of celebrities and bold colours
2) Anything really but mostly bands such as Coldplay and Kings on Leon
3) Not very often, maybe once every 2/3 months
4) I like reading about new artists and seeing upcoming gigs

Answer 2:
1) Bright colours and a big colourful picture to catch the audiences attention.
2) Indi bands such as Forever The Sickest Kids and We the Kings etc.
3) About once a month
4) Nothing better to do, it passes the time

Answer 3:
1) Well known bands and freebies
2) RnB and Hip-Hop etc
3) Abut once a week
4) To read agony aunt articles and read gossip on the celebs


Evaluation:


After looking over what people have said above, I think it would be a good idea to include bold text/colourful writing on my front cover so as to attract attention and make people want to pick it up and read it. From the answers I also found that most people like indi music and fashion combined so I decided to do an article on an upcoming indi/dance artist who is also a model.  


Mood board

Main Project Planning

Main project:

It was harder to choose a topic for my real project as there was so much I could have done it on. I made a list again to choose topics and this included things such as:

A new marriage for ex WAG
Chipmunk’s success
Latest line-up for gig
Music star injured

However I wanted to write about something interesting, not just the latest celebrity gossip, and that is why I chose my article to be on upcoming artist’s success. I wasn’t sure about what to write about, so I decided to make it into an interview asking questions about her career and what the future holds.

List of questions I chose:

At what age did you start singing?
How did you find out about the competition?
Do you have any role models?
Have you entered any other competitions before?
How will this affect your future?
What genre of music do you prefer?
Where do you hope to e in 10 years?
Did anyone inspire you to become a singer?


The hardest part was taking pictures. I tried lots of different pictures because I couldn’t decide what genre of music she sang. I eventually decided she was a pop artist, but as most magazines are on singers in the charts, I said in my article she was into country music, and therefore I decided to make her look as though she were a country singer.

This is where I came up with the idea of having her outside on the front cover and double page spread. It also made a really pretty scene as it was bright. I chose that specific dress as it added to the brightness and made her stand out more because it was colourful.

I also decided to use a wide shot of her, as the background made the picture look better, and I thought it looked better than having a medium close up or close up, which is what most magazines use nowadays.

I matched the writing colour to the background picture so it made it all fit together better. Some writing was in a golden yellow colour to match the bit of building in the background. This colour also fitted very well because I wanted it to feel like a spring/summer magazine. I then used the colour white again because it stood out from the background better and matched her dress.

I used that certain font style because she looks quite elegant in the picture and aristocratic in the picture.

When designing my contents page I didn’t want it to look plain so I used different colours on the background. I chose pink because it matched the colours on the models dress on the front cover and double page spread. I then chose the light grey as it matched quite well with the light pink. I wanted to use quite bold font to make the topics stand out. I also only chose to have 3 pictures on my contents page because I didn’t want to overcrowd it. However I did rotate them and put them behind/in front of each other to make it look more artistic so they didn’t look they were just placed there without any thought going into them.

I left choosing a name for my magazine to the end. I wanted something that would make it seem like a music and fashion magazine put together. As the magazine was based on music, I had to come up with a name that mainly symbolised that. When looking at magazine names though, I preferred the fashion magazine names to the music ones such as OK and Vogue.

Here is a list of some names I came up with:

Crunk
Rhythm
Megaphone
Fuel
Hip-hop
Hear
Here


I eventually decided on the name Here. I liked this name because it was here and hear combined. As it had fashion elements in it, it meant the fashion news in ‘here’. And as it was a music magazine it was as if saying, ‘hear’ the music.