Target Audiences

So the next stage is target audiences for the magazine. if I know who's going to read it I'll have a better idea on how I should structure it. Also various other personal thougths could be useful, so a questionnaire seems like a sensible option. I chose to ask the following things

1.Age (tickbox of groups)
2.Student/parent/other
3.Currently read magazine?
4.Personal choice of cover image
5.Features liked
6.Features disliked
7.Most important things for cover to include
8.Preferred colour scheme
9.Preferred font style

From these questions I found that:

• Most readers were middle aged (30-50)


• Around 4/5 were parents


• That only around half actually currently read the magazine


• Sport and CCF are popular cover images whereas academics are not


• The celebration of students seems to be well liked, as does the mix of focus on sport, CCF and academics equally
• The amount of celebration on the staff and awards the school has achieved seem more unpopular, so shoudl be less emphasised
• The conscensus was that the cover should include a mix of sports, CCF and the College itself, these were the three main popular ideas in the feedback
• A colour scheme involving the school colours was the most popular choice
• Very elegant, serif fonts were cited as the most liked

So from this I have a few ideas to base my design on, main cover images, popular font and colours, and who I should be aiming to attract, so it should have a more intellectual focus as opposed to an eye grabbing one, although it should still be aesthetically pleasing, but in a different way

It begins, I'm gonna start by looking at magazine covers to identify what we need to be looking for, so I shall insert the pictograms and deconstruct them

Now I'm not persoanlly interested in Cosmopolitan, but I stole this image from google and it covers naming all the relevant parts to a front cover, so seems a good guideline, and I can use it to see what is popularly done, now for something I'm more interested in before I look into possible trends

Right, now to look into likenesses and how it reflects the demographic

• A single main image is used each time
• As well as the masthead there seems to be one or more main articles which are covered by a cover line and a smaller piece of information related to it
• Spreading the rest of the information around also seems to be popular
• Cosmopolitan has much more language on it than the other two, reflecting the target demographic well, the Cosmopolitan targetting intelligent women whereas the other two to attract everyday people interested in music/gaming respectively

They seem to be the striking ideas to my mind, I can see how a cover seems to be structured, and how different ideas and image/text proportions can be used to appeal to different groups.

With school magazines being the focus of the task I decided to find some more topical ones to look at such as these :

• The single main image idea seems popular here as well
• The masthead is consistent and prominent
• A single tagline is used both times
• The images represent different ideas, both of which are important