Planning my college magazine.

I undertook some research as part of the planning for my College Magazine. In small groups, we all looked at 6 existing magazines which we had to analyse. We commented on the font, size, colours, images and tried to work out what the theme was. This gave me many ideas as each of the magazine covers differentiated and i was left with an idea of how I wanted mine to look. As part of the planning for my college magazine cover, the whole of the class came up with a questionnaire which we could all use. This had 10 suitable questions, some of which were yes or no answers and others were categorized answers. There was also an 'other' choice on some of the questions in which the person filling in the questionnaire could state what their other choice was. The results from this showed that the majority of people who filled a questonnaire in said yes to wanting a college magazine, wanted to see college news, local gig guides, events, technology reviews and more, would pay £1 for an issue every fortnight, liked pop music and the most popular pastime was music. Most people also read vogue, nuts and glamour as an existing magazine and wanted a chatty college magazine.
The target audience for the questionnaire was college students or people at the same age. This is because anybody of a different age would have a different opinion of whether a college magazine would be a good idea or not. They would also have different opinions on the type of things they would like to see included in a college magazine, and possibly the price. College students would also have many ideas on ways in which the magazine could be improved, and they would be able to give a valuble contribution to what the magazine should include and what they would like to see.
I analaysed a real existing college magazine called "Be Your Own Pet." I did this on a programme called Flickr where I was able to add tags to different parts of the front cover and write about them. The tags would only appear when the mouse was hovered over them therefore it did not ruin the image either. The magazine has a natural theme as the band which are featured on the front cover are standing outside, in very natural poses. I was able to gather a lot of information about the inside meaning of the text, fonts and images. I also got ideas about what to include inside my own magazine.
To plan my contents page, I used an existing real magazine in which I had to copy the layout for. I used 'Womans Own' magazine but changed the title of my contents to 'ENSFC' which is the college name. To plan my front cover, I sketched out on paper a design of how I wanted it to look after i had made it. I got my ideas for this from existing magazines i had seen, the questionnaire results and my own creativity. I used the same colour scheme as the exisiting magazine in which I based my contents page on as I wanted them to look similar. I used contrasting yellow and pink as it was bright and grabbed an audience's attention.