The document discusses the process of designing magazines for a college course. It describes creating a music magazine aimed at teenagers to fill a gap in magazines catering to chart/pop music. It also created a college magazine appealing to prospective college students. Key learnings included using simple backgrounds and colors that complemented images to direct attention. Formats from other magazines like NME and New were inspirations. The final magazines featured informal language and bold colors to attract teenage audiences.

2. Throughout my research, I began to notice that most music magazines are specific to a particular
genre of music and I found it very hard to find a magazine that catered for purely chart/pop
music for teenagers. For example, Mojo magazine features a lot of different artists but it’s
rare that chart music will be covered. Also Kerrang magazine is a purely rock magazine that
only appeals to people who like rock music. I wanted to make my magazine appeal to as
many people as possible and I thought the easiest way to do this was to base it on current,
pop music. This meant that the target audience for my magazine would most likely be
teenagers. I tried to appeal to this target market by featuring a young, up and coming star on
the cover.
I wanted to have a similar target audience for my college magazine, obviously, with it being a
college magazine I want it to appeal to students at college and prospective students which
means they will predominately be teenagers. I tried to create a young looking magazine with
a fashion feel so that it appeals more to the fashionable teenage market.
Despite these differences, I used inspiration from NME magazine for the contents page of my
music magazine – I liked the clean, simple layout and the very simple colour scheme. Also I
took inspiration from New magazine’s contents page for my college magazine – I thought
that it had a vibrant feel that would appeal to teenagers.

3. My music magazine in particular, I feel definitely represents teenagers and possibly people in their 20s. The
music featured is very new and most of it is in the charts. This target audience was my intention when
planning the music magazine. Although I wanted to make my music magazine appeal to as many people as
possible, I think that it may only appeal to people who like chart/pop music. However, I don’t think this is
such a bad thing because there is not many magazines on the market that cater for this group of people.
The design of the magazine is quite bold overall, I decided to use colours that would attract attention such as
bright greens and blues along with darker background colours. I think this, again represents the audience
that I was aiming for, I find that bold, bright colours appeal to younger generations as opposed to people
over 40 for example.
I tried to keep the design gender neutral so that it could appeal to as many people as possible, I made a point
of doing this after my college magazine turned out to look very much like a women’s fashion magazine.
Although I thought that the college magazine would appeal to teenagers, I thought that it might not
represent the teenage market as a whole.
I tried various colour schemes for the cover of my music
magazine but I eventually decided that green and sky blue was
the combination that I liked most, I thought that the blue and
green stood out well on the background and the overall cover
looked bold and exciting.

4. As I’ve made magazines for this coursework, the media institution that would distribute my
product is the print industry. The magazine would need to be printed to be sold in shops
and supermarkets all over the country so I would need to print the magazine on a large
scale if it was to be sold in the real world.
I would use advertisements in other established magazines and newspapers to promote my
product which would also be involved in the printing industry.
I planned my magazines to be aimed at teenagers. The college magazine is aimed at
teenagers attending college and looking to start studying at college. The magazine appeals
to them because of it’s news and offers relating to college life.
The music magazine, similarly is aimed at teenagers, I created a wide target audience by
appealing to both male and female, and by featuring music that is widely recognised and
listened to. I featured young musicians and used images and a design that I think would
appeal to people of this age group. I wanted the magazine to be cheap so it is accessible
to most people as a lot of teenagers often don’t have a lot of money to spend on luxuries
like magazines.

5. In my college magazine and especially the
music magazine, I used informal
language throughout that teenagers
would relate to. The colour scheme of
the music magazine is very bold which
would attract attention on the
newsstand of a shop.
The colour scheme on my double page spread, I think,
is particularly striking. I first decided on which image I
wanted to use for my double page spread, then I used
colours that would match/compliment the image. As
you can see I used a faded image background as I
think it gives the page more depth and I thought that
the white text stood out well against this dark
background. The quote text and the title for the page
matched the colour of the lighting in the image which
helped the whole article to tie in together. I then based
the rest of the magazine around this colour scheme as
you can see on the contents and front cover of the
music magazine.

6. My colour scheme
helped in attracting the
audience in more ways
too, I used a black and
white image on the cover
so that there were no
distracting colours – this
helped the parts of the
front cover of my music
magazine that were
actually in colour stand
out even more. I think
that the masthead, the
blue sell lines at the
‘Reading and Leeds...’
sell line stand out
extremely well against the
black and white colours
surrounding them. The
same idea works on the Most of the colours on this page
double page of the music are pink, blue or purple. I used
magazine and the cover white writing to make the coloured
of the college magazine. text stand out above the rest.

7. Throughout this process, I have learnt that it is possible to create
professional looking products using basic, everyday software such as
Microsoft Publisher. However, I combined Microsoft Publisher with
Adobe Photoshop to edit my images and give them a more
professional look than I could have achieved in Microsoft Paint for
example.
I also learnt how to design a magazine layout. Reflecting on the
college magazine and the music magazine that I’ve created, I think
the music magazine looks better. When I first made a college
magazine, I used very large text on the cover and found it hard to find
a colour that matched the background of my mock college
magazine. I worked out which fonts looked best and especially which
colours work well together – I found that bright colours on a dark
background work very well.
My final college and music
magazines featured images
that had very simple
backgrounds, this directed
the viewers attention to the
things on the page that I
MOCK college magazine wanted them to look at.
Also, it made it much easier
to find colours of font that
worked well with the
background.

8. The bright light here
distracts the reader from
the information and
main image on the page.
I think that the text for some of the
sell lines on this page are too big, I
could have fit much more text onto
the cover.
When making my mock college magazine, I used
a detailed main image and I had to use an outline
for some of the text to make it stand out from
the image. I think this looked unprofessional and
I learnt from this when making the next two
front covers.

9. I edited the background on the main
image for my music magazine so that
it didn’t distract the reader and left a
plain background for the text that I
wanted to add.
I think that the image worked
well in black and white. I used
the Photoshop Desaturate
option to create this effect.
I made the font much smaller on this magazine cover,
contents and double page spread I printed samples of
font out to see if it would be large enough to read. I
even reduced the size of some of the font on my
double page spread down to 10pt. This meant that I
could fit more information onto the page.
I learnt that I could adjust the character
spacing of text on Microsoft Publisher, this
helped me when creating my music
magazine cover, I like the way that the
letters in ‘SPARK’ are spaced out.

10. On all of my covers, I edited the masthead and the main image together in Photoshop so
that part of the image overlapped the masthead. I thought this made the magazine look
more professional.

11. FRONT COVER
I am pleased with both my
preliminary task and the full product,
however, I think that after completing
the college magazine I was able to
design and make the music magazine
with less research because of the
knowledge I’d previously gained.
I think out of everything,
I’ve learnt about the layout of a
magazine most. I created a few
different designs for the college
magazine before I was satisfied with
the result. I used existing magazine
research to see how their content is
arranged on the page. I found that a
lot of the text in a magazine is quite I liked the large sell line at
small. The first design I created of the the bottom of the page in
college magazine didn’t look as the final college magazine
professional as it could have in my – I decided to keep this
opinion and I rectified this in the idea when moving onto the
college and music magazines by using music magazine.
smaller font.

12. FRONT COVER I’ve found that by using three key
I’ve learnt from designing my initial colours, the magazine can look
college magazine cover that it is much more eye catching and visually
easier and clearer for the reader if you appealing. I kept this idea
have a plain background image. It’s throughout making my music
easier to find a text colour that will work magazine. As you can see, the
with the image and there is often more cover of my music magazine
space on the page to fit information. features black, green and blue
mainly.
This cover of Q for
example seems quite
cluttered even though
it doesn’t feature a
huge amount of text.
The heavily detailed
background makes it
harder to read the text
and distracts me from
the information that is
being displayed.

13. CONTENTS PAGE
Each time that I designed a new contents page, I learnt that there needed to be more information on the
page and less blank space. You can see the difference between my first contents page (bottom left) and
my final contents page (bottom right). The area is filled up more on the music magazine contents page
whereas the two college magazine pages have more empty space. I realised that a long block of text
wasn’t appealing to the reader after getting feedback on my contents page, so when I created the music
magazine I decided to split the contents into sections with images relating to articled and headings above
articles so that readers would be able to find what they’re looking for easily.

14. From my preliminary task to the main
task, I learnt that timing and
organisation was imperative to
meeting a deadline. For my music
magazine, I took the photos right at
the beginning of the project so that I
could then decide on colour schemes
and where the pictures would be
placed in the magazine. Whereas in
the college magazine, I designed
layouts before I took the final cover
image which then meant that I had to
change the colour scheme and layout
to suit the new image.