Evaluation

Amy Webley

I set out to make a fashion magazine that would appeal to a female audience aged between 20-25. I started by doing research into different magazines to explore the conventions that they follow and the colour schemes they used and what this can portray about the target audience. When researching I particularly focused on fashion magazines as I would be creating one. I brought a fashion magazine into the lesson and took pictures of it to include into my research to help me further my research into the conventions of the magazines and what makes them successful. This research helped me see how important the different conventions are and the messages that they portray to the reader to draw them in and make them want to buy the magazine. An example of this is the use of sell lines, the choice of words are chosen to appeal to the reader as it may be something that they aspire to or can take inspiration from, if the reader feels that they will benefit from reading the magazine then they will buy it. I also thought that it would be important to look at the fonts that are used in fashion magazines, I found that most of them used a serif font. I thought that by using a similar font then it would make it look like it would fit into the high-end band of fashion magazines. Although the font isn’t a key convention it can be the difference between a magazine being considered high-end or low-end. Looking into the structure of these magazines helped me understand how they work and helped shape my idea for how I wanted mine to look to achieve a similar look.

In the process of creating my magazine I had to make a number of creative decisions, the first one was deciding on a colour palette that would have to flow through the cover, contents and double page spread. At first I decided on a pink colour scheme as my target audience was females and this colour is commonly used for female magazines as it is the stereotypical colour that is associated with women. I tried this colour palette with my cover and used an actress as a stand in image until I could insert my own pictures. However when it was all put together I changed my mind and saw that it didn’t work for the look that I was trying to achieve. Through my research I had seen that high-end magazines were mostly minimalistic with colour only used on the font, the design of mine made it look more mid-range. I decided to change my colour palette entirely to achieve the look that I wanted. I went back to my magazine research and looked at the questionnaire responses and one of the questions specified about how often readers wanted magazines to be released, the most popular response was every season. As I had struggled to come up with a colour scheme and didn’t want to choose a monochrome look, despite the common use of it, I decided to create a colour scheme based on a season. I chose Spring and chose a pastel yellow and a navy blue. The decision set me back because I had to recreate my entire cover, but I was pleased with the final result. I also had to reconsider my text to ensure that the sell lines didn’t seem to portray a cheaper brand. I had to be careful about my layout so that everything was in the correct place e.g. that the anchorage text was on top of the key image but also slightly to the side and at the correct size to make it stand out.

My magazine follows the forms and conventions of current magazines relatively closely, there are some differences that usually differ between magazines. I think that my magazine follows similar forms and conventions to Elle magazine because when I was doing my research this was the magazine that I turned to when looking for inspiration for layout and structure. The Elle cover page also looks similar to mine as I took inspiration from what I had seen there and altered it slightly and

used my own colour scheme. The layout on my cover was similar as they keep their sell lines and anchorage text towards the side so that the key image is the main focus, and I followed a similar pattern.

Overall I was happy with my final product, I think that one of the key strengths is the colour scheme that continues throughout and the simplistic design of it so that the design doesn’t look cluttered. The weakness of my designs is the size of the font; the anchorage text could be bigger to draw the reader in.

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