Magazine Cover/Contents Evaluation

1. Who were your target audience? How did you ensure that you addressed them? Were you able to communicate to your audience effectively?

My target audience was female students aged 16-20 who were interested in fashion and wanted to know the best shops to get the latest styles at high street prices. They also wanted to beauty tips as well as advice services, real life stories and information about lifestyle and staying healthy. I addressed the specific needs of this audience by making sure that I included articles and headlines that were aimed towards this group which they would find interesting and appealing. I also used an images on my front cover and contents page which were of people around the same age who they could relate to. I think that I was able to commmunicate to my audience effectively as I used images and vocabulary which were designed and aimed towards this particular audience, my magazine was a resonable prices which would be suitable for a college student and all of my featured fashions were from affodable high street shops.


2. How is your text similar to other magazines? What did you take from other specific magazines? How have you attempted to be original? Was this successful?

My magazine in many ways was similar to some of the top fashion magazines as I was inspired by Elle and Marie Claire. I wanted to create a magazine which was similar in style to these, being fashionable and glamorous, but also conventional and sophisticated way. Magazines such as these are aimed towards professional women who are in the position to buy the type of designer fashions presented in things like Vogue, Marie Claire and Elle, but I wanted to make a magazine which incoroporated these features but was aimed towards a younger, less mature audience who could not affored to buy a magazine costing around £3.50. I think that this approach was successful as I was able to create something that would be appealing to my target audience there is nothing on the market like this at the moment. I myself buy Elle or Marie Claire but I am finding that it is too expensive.


3. If your magazine was real, would it be high or low budget? Where and how would it be distributed? Is your audience large enough to interest a major publisher? If not... how would you raise the money to establish your magazine? Advertising? How might this influence the nature of your text?

If my magazine was real I think that it would be fairly low budget as this is how I wanted my magazine to be as it aimed at college students. But thinking about it to create the magazine itself it would be difficult to do on a limited budget as it needs to include glossy images and articles as well as advertising which could cost a lot to feature. However if the magazine sold advertising it would be able to generate enough money to be sold at a lower, more reasonable price. I am unsure if the magazine would have a large enough audience. But as it is a niche in the market it might be quite popular as nothing like it really exists, so it may be able to create a large fan base. But as there are some similar existing products aimed at the same audience, such as 'Sugar' and slightly older magazines like 'Look' and 'Grazia'.


4. What have you learned about Adobe Photoshop, Quark Xpress and using the digital SLR cameras. What difficulties did you face with the technology and how did you solve them?

I liked using each of the different programmes as they worked well for each of the different stages of the production. I however did not use the SLR digital cameras from the college, as I took my picture outside of college time, However I still got an image that I was happy with. Photoshop was fairly easy to use and allowed me to change my backgrounds, crop my image and cut it out with ease. I also wanted to put on some other images, some of shoes and party dresses. I had difficulties doing this on Quark and then understood that I had to put them on the original image using photoshop. Other than that I did not have many problems using the programmes. On Quark it took me a while to understand how everything worked as it is slightly more complex than photoshop and i struggled trying to find how to get other colours than the given ones.


5. What would you do differently if you were to produce another magazine.

If I was to produce another magazine i would try to make it to target a larger audience not just girls who are interested in fashion and looking good but to those who need some extra help with this. Also there are not many magazines on the market which focus on lifestlye that are available to this audience.