Original Ideas Statement

The target audience for my magazine is going to be aimed predominantly towards females, for a slightly young age range of sixteen to twenty years old. My magazine will be for females interested in indie/pop based music and who follow a high-end/ indie fashion, and will find my magazine appealing.

The price of my magazine will be roughly £2-£4 as my genre is a high class, sophisticated market, so it will be for people who can afford to pay this much a month, as it isn't a young market I’m aiming for. Magazines such as Vogue and Elle, cost similar  amounts as this, so I believe this is a reasonable price, as these are some that I am trying to be inter-textual when creating my magazine.

I will issue my magazine monthly to counter the fact my magazine is somewhat higher priced than high street brands. Also I am choosing this because it is conventional for a magazine in m genre to be selling monthly instead of weekly.

I will make the model of my magazine in order to appeal to m audience, as I found this from my audience research. Also I am going to use pastel based colours, as this is a stereotypically favourite by my target audience of female.

Feature Article Draft

Contents Page Draft

Front Cover Draft

Colour Scheme Mood Board

I created a colour mood board for the magazine I am going to create.  I chose these colours as I think they would be appealing to my target audience of females. I am leaning towards the more pastel colours as I think they are more attractive and will contrast the font colour I will use, which is black. I particularly like them yellow and pink as I think these colours complement each other well. 

Fonts Mood Board

I created this mood board by experimenting with fonts in order to select the best one that fits in with the style of my magazine. I have chosen to mainly steer towards serif fonts, as they are conventionally used in high end magazine like Vogue and Elle. The fonts i have chosen connote formality and sophistication which is a representation of what genre i want my magazine to portray. The majority of these fonts would be suitable for Mastheads or main cover lines, as i think the capitalised forms are particularly effective. 

Advertisers Mood Board

As my magazine is going to be for a female target audience, of who are interested in high end fashion and indie music, for example I chose ‘Beats’ headphones to interest the music end of my target audience, and clothing brands such as Zara and Topshop to intrigue the fashion end, in order to widen my target audience. The brands on my mood board are who I think would be appealing to my target audience to advertise in my magazine. 

Target Audience Mood Board

From mood board, I have concluded that my target audience is going to be females, who are interested in fashion and music. I have used specific brands because I want my magazine genre to be high end fashion; so included things such as Gucci ad Louis Vuitton. Also I have included indie/pop artists such as Lana Del Ray, Bastille and Disclosure as this is the genre of music I want to feature in my magazine. As well as music I have included style icons such as Cara Delavigne, Kate Moss and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as I want my magazine to be mixed genre of music and fashion. I have incorporated objects that I thought my target audience would be interested in for example, Chanel perfume, flowers, makeup, shoes etc.  I have leaned predominantly towards the late teenage female target audience, and my mood board represents this genre. 

NME Magazine Analysis

New Music Express is the full title of the commonly known magazine NME. It is the longest going music magazine and has had issues published weekly since 1952. They started as a newspaper at first, and then changed into a magazine format. Their award winning website has become the largest commercial site in Europe for music, and now has over five millions users a month. In the 1970’s NME became the best-selling newspaper in Britain and was the first to feature the ‘singles chart’ starting the trend for future magazines. From 1998 onwards, NME transformed into a glossy magazine format. In 2009 Kris Murison took over and became the first female Editor of NME; however the current editor is Jo Smalley. Their website ‘NME.com’ is currently edited by Mike Williams. The target audience of the magazine is from 17-35, so pricing the magazine at £2.80 is a reasonable amount, as the consumer will be earning a sufficient amount of money to pay for the magazine weekly, as they have some disposable income. The magazine has a gender ratio of 66% male, and 34% female. So it doesn’t completely eliminate a female audience; therefore reaching a wide range of people increasing its profit. On average the consumer spends forty six minute reading each issue which infers that they are interested with the content they are receiving, as they don’t quickly scan over each page, they actually are taking the time to read the issue. 96% of the target audience of NME have access to the internet, showing how convergent the magazine is, and that it can be used on different platforms, attracting a wider audience.


  In the 1960’s bands and artist like The Beatles and The Rolling stones would feature on NME. During this era the paper started to promote the rise of supremacy of British groups. This began the merging of pop music in NME and Rock. During this time the sales of the paper were around 200,000 copies being sold per issue. In 2000 NME started to feature artists such as Jay Z, Missy Elliot, in order to have a larger target audience, by also featuring R&B/ Rap artists. However as they have had a target audience that were interested in the rock genre they lost a lot of their artists, so consequently stopped with the new added genre. A point of success for NME is when they started to promote Indie genre bands. The magazine continued to emerge when they started to feature bands such as The Kaiser Chiefs, The Artic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand.


  The magazine uses convergence by not only having the biggest commercial site in Europe, but they also host NME awards in Texas. They also have their own app available to download on iTunes. You can also subscribe and receive each issue to your Kindle to read. Another platform being they have their own YouTube channel. NME also is the winner of many awards such as ‘Music Media brand of the year in 2013.’ On social networking sites they have over 470,000 likes on Facebook, 710,000 followers on Twitter and over 31,000 followers on Instagram. NME is owned by IPC media, a successful and highly stated publisher. However in 1972 they found themselves at the point of closure, and therefore ending NME. Alan Smith was made editor and turned the paper around. He made dramatic changes which dominated and ruined other music papers such as Melody Maker and Disc.

Magazine Publishers

Bauer: Bauer is Europe’s largest privately own publishing group. The company creates 25% of England’s sales revenue for magazines. It engages with nineteen millions consumers a week, and features some of the most influential brands to the UK. It was first established in 1953 with the launch of ‘Angling Times’ and then ‘motor cycle news’ in 1956, which are still brands they feature in their portfolios. The company consists of two main divisions – magazine and radio, which are widely recognised as industry innovators. The most well-known brands that Bauer represents are: Q- which is the UK’s biggest selling monthly magazine; Kerrang- which caters to a wide genre of rock music for its young target audience; FHM- which is the UK’s largest men’s lifestyle brand. It represents brands that are targeted at women’s for example Grazia and Heat.


IPC Media: IPC is the UK’s leading company for printing and publishing for digital magazine content, and is responsible for 20% of the revenue for Magazines in England. They produce over 60 iconic brands of which reaches 58% of women and 42% of men in the UK. The consumer interacts with this company two hundred and fifty million times a year, which is ten times a second. The company was formed in 1963 when three companies were merged together by George Newnes to create ‘International Publishing Cooperation.’ IPC represent ‘Horse and Hound’ which dates back to the 19th century. It focus on three main aspects in its ‘cooperate responsibility,’ which are: community and education- by them helping with two charities; employee involvement- where they support their employees with volunteer work; environment- where the company focuses on how they the impact they have on the environment and how they can reduce it. The company represents NME which is the world’s most iconic music magazine, also popular fashion magazines including Look and Marie Claire. IPC also has a digital audience which brands reach nearly three million adults.


Future PLC: Future in an international special interest media group formed in 1985, and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. They create of 180 publications, websites and events for its consumer. They hold market leading position in game, film, music, technology, cycling, automotive and crafts. Also they annually host 27 live events for the brands they represent. Future sells over three millions magazines a month, and exports or syndicates publications to ninety countries internationally, making it number one exporter and licensor of monthly magazines. Future has three main categories in which their magazines fall into: Technology- which has over 25 million visitors to their websites each month and represents brands such as T3, Gizmodo and LifeHacker. Music, film and games- this genre reaches over fourteen million people globally a month and represents brands such as sfx and Xbox; Photography and creative- which represent companies such as Computer, Arts and Digital camera, which is the best-selling magazine in print.

Overview of the Magazine Industry

Over view of the magazine industry In the UK there are over 800 magazines being published. They can be categorised into the following:
1. Consumer – sold in newsagents, supermarkets and online
2. Business / trade / professional / B2B - for people at work;
3. Customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing;
4. Staff magazines to inform staff about their company
5. Newspaper supplements - come free as part of daily or Sunday paper;
6. Part works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopaedia' on a specific topic;
7. Academic journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.


There are group of magazine publishers that dominate the market. ‘Bauer publishing’ creates 25% of the magazine revenue in the UK. ‘Time Warner’ is 20% of the revenue, and The BBC as 7.5% of the market. Today in the UK there are over 3,200 different consumer titles. 1.4 billion Magazines sold each year, and 85% of the population reads magazines. In the last ten year 500 magazines have launched annually, but 3 out of 4 survive after four years. In the last few years, as technology has developed, in order for magazine companies to continue to thrive, convergence has been adapted. Magazines now enable different platforms for their audience. You now can view a magazine online and through apps. This makes life easier for the consumer as they don’t have to go out and physically buy the magazine in a paper copy; they can simply download it from the internet.

Magazine Textual Analysis

Questionnaire Analysis

·         Of the people that we asked, 65% were female and 35% were male. So I can conclude that the target audience should be aimed mostly towards women.

·         95% of the respondents we are did not read the college magazine, which is an issue that needs to be improved in future, as it has failed on reaching its target audience.

·         The most popular colours chosen by the audience we asked chose: Black, blue and white. These colours will be the colour scheme I use in my magazine.

·         Of the respondents we asked 85% said they would pay between nothing and 50p for the magazine. In order to make profit we will have to make the price of the magazine higher than the cost of making it, although it won’t gain any popularity and may not even sell.

·         70% of the people asked said they would prefer the magazine to be product monthly. This allows the magazine to feature more content on every issue, whereas it might struggle to have things to say if it was every week for example.

·         When we questioned the formality of the magazine 50% of respondents said they would prefer it to be informal, 10% said it should be formal, and the other 40% said it should be a mix of the two.  From these results I can conclude that the majority of people want it to be informal, so I will make my magazine informal, however still have some formal elements, to cater for the other percentage of people.

·         Out of the options given the main themes that chosen were: Music, college trips, and free gift. Other slightly less popular options were sport, fashion, and technology. So I will try to include the majority of these themes, if not all of them.

·         50% of the people wanted an image of a student to be on the front cover of the magazine, while 30% wanted it to be a celebrity and 30% wanted it to be nature. I could change what type of image I have on my cover every issue in order to appeal to a wider target audience.

·         100% of candidates wanted a job page. so I will make it essential that I have this on mine. 

College magazine analysis

This magazine front cover uses three font colours: yellow in the masthead; and blue and white in the cover lines. There are around three different font used throughout. The magazine main cover image uses superimposition to position the audience to focus on the model when first glancing at the cover. It uses the rule of thirds by the cover image being in the middle third and the cover lines in the others. The denotation of the text ‘think about sex all day’ in the cover lines connotes hyper sexualisation of model in the magazine which is a representation of a stereotypical idea of that all college students think about this. The denotation of the text ‘surprise career inside’ uses a promotion to position the consumer to want to buy it more. The denotation of the models clothing in the main cover image connotes hyper sexualisation which is representing women badly by them not seeming to be focusing on college more on their appearance. Also having cover lines such as ‘3 steps to group project success’ is representation of the idea that the magazine is promoting a helpful message to its consumer by giving them ways to improve their college life.  Having the colours on the magazine be bright and colourful make it more appealing to a college student.

College magazine front cover and contents page

Looking back at your preliminary task (the college magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

Who would be the audience for your media product?