Prem Coursework- Magazine ideas

One of the first things I did after being briefed was to think about a title that I could work around and would suit the theme and style of the magazine. So firstly, I brainstormed ideas for potential titles for my magazines:

After surveying my title ideas I found that ‘the Student mag’ was favoured and I agreed as it is snappy, simple title that ‘does what it does on the tin’. Also, as it has to be a school/college magazine and is aimed at students I wanted the title to have a certain level of informality as students tend to get bored with straight up formal magazines.

After choosing a title for my title for the magazine I decided to come up with a slogan/catchphrase for my magazine that can be associated with the magazine.
I found that that ‘be one step ahead!’ was a popular one amongst my peers as it was short, memorable and snappy.

After creating a title and slogan, I could then work around it and build a look around it and the other areas of magazine production which are:

· Content
· Colours
· Style
· Font

Content: For the contents of my magazine cover I decided to include pictures of students working in different areas of school life and subjects. For example, people on computers, people in lessons etc. I was also thinking of putting a collage of photos that I will be taking. In order to acquire the photos I am hoping to go into lessons around school, with permission of teachers, and take photos of the learning environment. However, I wanted a main big picture in the middle of the front cover and my idea for this was a picture of a student with their head split into four and have different genders and races in those four sections. For my contents page I was thinking of having a collage of the photos taken.

Colours: For my magazine I also had to come up with colours to put on the front cover and colour schemes and I thought of using a range of aquatic, calm colours: A variety of blues, whites, reds and greys and blacks. I am choosing these colours as I believe it will complement the pictures, title and theme of my magazine and make it look attractive to my target audience. I am hoping that the blues and whites would be dedicated to the front cover and the greys and blacks to the background to make the contents of the page stand out.

Style: For the style of my magazine I approached it with a ‘less is more’ attitude. I decided to do this as I found, from my research, that having less things on the page is more noticeable than a front page being crowded for this particularly magazine anyway (school/college). However, having less things on a page means that the actual contents of the page has to be powerful and get the right message across.

Font: From what I learnt during my research process, I found that Fonts play a very big and important part in magazine production and everything has to be done for a purpose. So I will try a trial and error with my fonts and then survey the titles and see which one appeals to my target audience. One thing is for sure that I have to do is make sure every title I produce has to compliment the front cover and stand out.