PRE-TASK Planning Magazine Parts

Planning Magazine Parts

I spoke to 15 people to find out what they wanted out of a college magazine and they said that they were looking for something that gave them useful information about school and later life, but still had entertaining parts and parts to show that it was made by a student rather than a teacher. They also said that they wanted actual students to be part of the magazine as well, for example, students could have their own column to right about a subject they love or something they find interesting.

Name/Title

I asked 15 people what their favourite name was, the amount of votes is shown next to each title:

• Subject (5/15)
• Project (2/15)
• The Print (2/15)
• College Monthly (0/15)
• Student (1/15
• College6 (3/15)
• Pencixth (2/15)

As you can see above, the winner for the title of my magazine is "Subject". This is a good name for a college or sixth form magazine because it links in well with the idea of it being a magazine for students still at school.

Slogan

I asked the same 15 people their opinion on some slogan ideas I came up with, as seen below:

• #Subject (3/15)
• #Info4Students (6/15)
• Telling you what's happening and when (0/15)
• What to do next (2/15)
• What's happening now? (2/15)
• By Students for Students (2/15)

As you an see from the results above, the winning slogan for the front cover of my magazine is: "#Info4Students". This slogan is perfect for the magazine because it tells you exactly what the magazine is and what it provides, as well as combining it with something modern, in this case, hash-tags. I am glad that I spoke to people about a slogan because, at first, I was not going to have one, I was just going to have the title on its own which as seen above, is less preferred.

Colour Scheme

I spoke to the same 15 students again, and asked them what type of colour scheme they would like. Would it be a light, neutral or dark colour scheme. The results are shown below:

• Light (10/15)
• Neutral (3/15)
• Dark (2/15)

As you can see above, by many votes, a light colour scheme is much preferred by my target audience. I spoke to them and found out that they preferred a lighter magazine because it showed positivity towards school, education and general life. Psychologically it is also a much more favoured and appealing colour scheme to look at. I found that it was a good idea that I asked other people because at first, I was going to use a darker colour scheme because I thought it would look more professional, but after speaking to people they preferred a lighter one.

Featured Articles

In my magazine, I will have many different articles that have been written by a wide range of students in the school, however there will be some that we will base that particular magazine issue on and some that they may find extra interesting. To advertise these I will put a small snippet or description of them on the front page so that people know what to look for, for example, "UCAS. What to do. How to do it and when." This is the title I have given to one of features articles. It is short catchy and tells you briefly, what will be in the issue.

As well as this example, I also did some research with my target audience to find out what they liked best, and most of them were interested in things for university to help prepare them, and give them more information. As well as this, they also wanted something funny and entertaining to help break up the seriousness and to make the readers more interested and engaged with the magazine. After hearing this, I came up with some more ideas such as, "10 tips for surviving college", "What happened to our Media Teacher!" and "How to revise". I got feedback from some students and and they said that they liked most of the ideas except from "How to Revise". They found this title boring and not something that would catch the eye of the reader. After some ideas, I came up with "Revision Secrets!", which they liked much more due to the use of words to draw readers in.