Evaluation - Question 5

I have decided to use things that most magazines use to attract an audience: eye catching image, bold title which is easy to remember. The first thing you notice is the nature of my image; it is very provocative and promiscuous. 40% of mainstream magazines use ‘sex to sell’. With a semi clothed beautiful female on the front of the cover, I think my magazine will sell very well, along with the intriguing articles within my magazine. My image is sexy, but is also sophisticated where you cannot see very much, it would be different if the model was in a tiny bikini and posing in a very seductive manner, but my model is trying to keep more to the imagination and make it exciting. I also took this into consideration of the audience’s parents, as if they bought a magazine home with a model half naked and looking promiscuous they may be in a spot of trouble, that’s why I decided to use this image as I thought it was a dangerous yet fun way of playing around with images. 

My model is also a very attractive female which is also a clear selling point in the industry today. For instant when Beth Ditto appeared on the cover on NME naked it created a huge fuss circulated about the size of the star as she is relatively overweight. Most people think that to pose naked on the cover of a magazine you have to look like ‘Jessica Alba’. I thought this was inspirational although my model is not overweight it was inspiring to think that NME had taken a picture of a bigger star and used it as the cover of there magazine. I liked this idea, and it always creates a fuss when up and coming stars pictures are found of them on social networking sites posing half naked, so I thought a good idea was to challenge this in a positive light and have a naked photo shot for the cover of my magazine. I will not make a habit of having my cover stars naked when my magazine is published but I thought it would be a nice insight to exciting and experimental things my magazine will entail and that something a bit risqué and edgy would appeal to the audience.

When attempting to by a magazine, most people look at the image and the cover lines on the front of the magazine. If it looks dull and banal there is not much hope of it selling very well. I used a house colour in the contents page and the magazine front cover, which I believe will attract the audience. I didn’t want to use contrasting colours as my audience research suggested that my audience wanted a magazine which connoted modernity.

Also when purchasing a magazine, it is not only the front cover, by also the contents page and the main feature of the magazine which appeals to the consumer. When buying a magazine, the readers also like to browse through the magazine, so having the house colours to show an on going theme was important, as the difference may be unappealing.

Here is my first draft of my magazine, it was very basic as first and didn’t include many bold cover lines which stood out. This was something I had to change as I wanted the cover line to be standing out and appealing to the audience, to make them more interested in the content of the magazine. 

I wanted my readers to be able to relate to the language I used throughout my magazine, people in college and generally young people do not tend to be sophisticated when they converse with one another, and tend to talk to each other in an informal way, so to get them to relate with my magazine I used informal language so my readers felt a connection and as if they where being spoken to.

In my double page spread in the interview I mentioned various celebrities’ names such as Cheryl Cole who is a huge pop sensation along with Pixie Lott, to try and make the interview seem realistic and also fans of these celebrities will also be interested to hear about them and will want to read my magazine.