Preliminary Work; Proposal

Proposal:

My target audience for my magazine is female college students. The magazine will contain information about college and fashion. The content for the college information will be on back to college, starting college, college supplies and a copy of the college map. The fashion part of the magazine will include fashion tips and the latest styles in autumn and winter.

The magazine will be released in the beginning of the college year, September. It will be an autumn edition and will be helpful for new students to learn about the college and what to expect. The magazine will be published monthly so that it allows enough information to be built up about college gossip and up-coming exam mocks or exams and revision. I think that if it was produced weekly then there wouldn’t be enough new information to be published and the consumers would get easily bored. The monthly edition also works with the fashion area of the magazine because fashion doesn’t change every week, so there would be more updates available every month. My magazine will be priced at £0.20 because students aren’t going to want to pay a lot for a college magazine, and I think 20p is a reasonable amount to pay, which I myself would be willing to pay.

I thought a lot about what I wanted my main cover line to be about. It was between college and fashion, my final decision was fashion. I thought that my main cover line should be eye-catching as it will be one of the main attractions consumers will have to the magazine. The main cover line that I am going to use is ‘Wooly Explosion’ because I think it fits in well with the genre of magazine and also the name of the magazine. The title of my magazine is ‘WOAH!’ and I chose it because it’s very catchy and short, and also, it relates to both fashion and college. College is a big step up from secondary school and ‘woah’ refers to the emotions of the first year students starting. It can also relate to the rest of the college year and students because ‘woah’ could also be said in a sigh of relief or relaxation. This will have a positive effect on the students because it is encouraging relaxing and reading the magazine just by its title. The title ‘Woah’, also fits in with the fashion part of the magazine because new trends are always unexpected and sometimes slightly over-the-top. It also expresses how amazing and surprising the new styles are.

I originally wasn’t going to use a tagline on my title because I couldn’t think of anything that could represent college life and the fashion industry. After a bit of thought I came up with ‘WOAH!...Express yourself’. I think that this is suited for my magazine type because ‘express yourself’ can mean through your image/clothes, or also through your work and life. It’s very to the point and snappy which makes it easy to look at, creating a positive attitude to the audience.

The font I am going to be using for the title is Hobo Std. I chose this font because it’s styled, bold and girly. This means that it will attract my target audience because it looks feminine but, it also looks powerful and important. For the tagline I am just going to use Arial because I don’t want it to over-power the main title. It’s important, but most magazines don’t make the taglines stand out as much as the brand name.

The size of my magazine will be A5 because it makes it easier to carry around and much more convenient as a whole. At college you have a lot of equipment to carry already so a small magazine would be perfect because its compact and can fit in your bag. I wanted the colour scheme to be girly, but also the fit in with the season. Autumn colours however are quite dull and misty so I will have to use a mixture of girly and autumn styles. I have decided on a trio of colours to use on my front cover and these are green/teal, orange and cream. I have chosen these three because they are all very autumn colours and will give a cosy and welcoming feel to the magazine. Also, the teal, orange and cream are girly colours which make the magazine suitable for the target audience. I went against my initial colour scheme of purple, red and cream because it didn’t match the background of my picture I had taken.

My front cover picture is going to be of a two students in the cafe at college. I want to take the picture in the cafe because it shows the college side to the magazine aswell as showing the craziness of college too. This will encourage a wider range of audience to consume my magazine. I will take this picture in my own time and will take it on college grounds.

In the contents page I would like to use two black and white images. One would be of autumn fashions and the other of a smaller version of the college map. I will take both of these pictures myself and will edit them into black and white. The colour scheme for the rest of the contents page will be teal (the same shade as the front cover) and black. I chose these because it matches the front cover still, bringing the magazine together as a whole. It also sticks to my initial ideas of girly but bold colour choices.

Date Completed: 29/10/2010