Media Lesson Overview

Since yesterday, I have been working on my magazine flat plans. I am being extremely detailed and this is helping me think about ways to make my magazine work. For example, initially I was just thinking about one image being on my front cover. However, whilst planning the front page I looked at other magazines and with ‘We Love Pop’ magazine, they included smaller pictures of other things rather than just one. I therefore caught onto this idea and thought it would be good to add this to my flat plan. My front cover flat-plan has been designed and I am currently working on my contents page. To help stick to the conventions of pop magazines yet give my magazine a unique look, I have looked at a variety of pop magazines and used ideas from all of them. For example I concentrated on the facial features of pop artist Miley Cyrus on the 'BillBoard' magazine, and merged it with the pose from the ‘Inked Girls’ magazine. I also started to consider various fonts that I could include when I start actually constructing my magazine. I have been exploring fonts on the website ‘DaFont’.

Planning- How to make my Flat-Plans Successful

I have come up with some ideas that will help me create a successful flat plan;

Reader Profile

Here is an example of how a typical reader of the magazine I aim to create will be;

Focus Group

Conducting Focus Group

Today I carried out my focus group using three 17 year old teenagers. I presented them with 2 magazines and asked them several questions which will help me when I come to produce my magazine. The results will be posted tomorrow.

Back-up Plan

Unfortunately, I have not yet received a reply from the artist I was hoping to feature on my magazine. I am still waiting, but I thought it would be foolish to waste time and not have a back-up plan. If I don’t hear from her, I could use her identity and use another face. I could use some of her history like being interested in music since a young age and being able to sing and play various instruments and then match that personality with the face that I use on my magazine. If after trying this I don’t think the idea worked, I could create a brand new artist.

Questionnaire Results

The target audience for this questionnaire were girls between the age of 15-17 as that was the age group I have been planning to target my magazine at. The questionnaire was handed out to 10 people. Here are my results;

For other- some said they buy it once in a while when they visit the corner shop and some others said they hardly ever buy magazines, they look at it and put it back on the shelves unless something really attracts them.
From these results I can see that monthly magazines are purchased the most. I could reflect these results on my own magazine and make it weekly. This means that my magazine will be straight to the point with less, but interesting information in it.

As I found out from my results that weekly magazines were the most popular, it would make sense for the £0-£2 category to be the most popular. I can see that the majority buy magazines often and therefore spend a lot of money on them. £2 would be a sensible price for my magazine, but any lower then this may make my magazine look too cheap. This could be bad as the target audience wouldn’t value it as much because of its low price. 

The artist, posters inside and interview are the highlights and attraction for my target audience. The model or artist I use for my magazine has to look like a proper artist for this reason, as if I use someone who doesn’t it could be disappointing and off-putting for my audience. For the poster I could use an image of the artist that takes up a large proportion of the double page spread. This could then be used as a poster. Teenagers may find too much writing boring, so I could make the interview very short but filled with rich information.
 

As the girl category was the most popular, I have decided that my featured artist will be female for sure.
 

For other- The majority said that they never really thought about this specifically and that they didn’t mind as long as the overall look worked and seem professional. The majority chose other, and from this I have realised that the audience are more bothered about it being attractive rather than worrying about how much information has been added. I will have to make sure that the structure of the magazine is successful and that I stick to the conventions of pop magazines, giving importance to things like the colour scheme and making sure that my magazine is cohesive overall.