'Impact Magazine' is the official magazine of Nottingham University. An effective feature of this magazine is the different topics it contains features on (news, sports, arts, film & television, music, science, travel style, food), as there will be something of interest to all students, regardless of what they're studying and their different interests.
These are a few magazines aimed at college students but are sold in local shops and are more well known than the two magazines listed above.
Q is a magazine about music which all college students are into massively; mostly every student will have a type of music they prefer listening to and Q magazine definitely covers all genres. I can use the music idea from Q for my own magazine as I know that's something all students are into. The layout of Q magazine isn't cluttered either, it's well organised and placed making the magazine look slick and organised which is another quality I could use for my own magazine.
Cosmopolitan is a well known magazine. I think that the effect of the bright colours would immediately catch your attention. The audience is obviously mainly female but the contrasts of the colours would catch the eye of college students hopefully making it their first choice.
Planning:
Audience profile for my magazine.
- You wear hoodies, jeans, vans and chinos.
- You own an ipod and an iphone/blackberry/htc mobile phone.
- You have facebook/twitter.
- You're not very health concerned.
- You hate early mornings.
- You despise buses.
- You live for weekends.
- You are Hedonists.
- You are underachievers/radicals.
- Your parents are B/C1/C2 on the Jicnar Scale.
For college students who love music but don't want to spend their money on a magazine all about music, they want to read about fashion, food and fun things to do as well. They made read Heat but also read Q so this magazine will be packed full of pretty much everything.
If you are the kind of person who rents Mean Girls as well as Inception and the kind of person who listens to one song from Paramore and then the next from Lady Gaga. Do you drink endless mugs of tea and spend most of your time on the computer? Then this magazine is for you.
In my research I found that most of the magazines aimed at students weren't serious, they were more fun. They were interesting to the audience it was aimed at and the colour schemes were bright and the fonts were bold, clear and easy to read. I will have to corporate this into my own magazine.
Name of my magazine: Bloom
Cover lines that may be used:
- 'Your top 10 songs of 2011'
- '20% off Nando's voucher'
- '5 amazing ways to revise'
- 'Check out which crazy jobs you could be doing with your a-levels'
- 'Is driving too expensive? Survey inside'
- 'This years top festivals: Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds, Big Chill, AND MORE...'
Me and my partner Jess discussed possible names for my magazine. We used the online thesaurus to come up with some names for our final products. I typed in youth and the thesaurus suggested adolescence, childhood, greenness, ignorance, bloom, immaturity and inexperience and out of all of them 'bloom' really stuck in my head and I thought it would a really good name for my magazine. Me and Jess then discussed the other options but they don't really make good stand out names that would draw in our attention. So 'Bloom' became my final choice.
Next I looked at different fonts that could be used for my masthead with the title 'Bloom'
Arial Rounded MT Bold for the masthead.
Verdana, Lucida Handwriting, Eras Bold ITC and Georgia Italics were all used as fonts on my front cover and inside my contents page. I think these promote high standard and a classy look like an up market magazine would have and they're not too childish for my audience which is 16-18 years of age.
The photography I used was simple and me and my partner Jess worked on the contents page together and decided we would use our own photos on the front page aswell as inside. We considered using props such as books, headphone or an L plate for driving lessons but in the end we decided to keep things simple only using a mid-length photo of each other for our front covers which we created having blurred out trees behind the image which we created using the portrait setting on an SLR camera and it made the cover look fresh. For the contents page Jess and I decided to use some props we could find around college - for example we used to vending machines that we used as the picture to promote one of our inside stories about the vending machines eating peoples money and not giving them the right amount of change. We also used a car to go along side another inside story about passing driving tests; we could have used an L plate for that but we'd seen photos of real students who had passed their driving tests getting a photo with their certificate outside of a car - I think this created something that looked really real.
