Target audience, ideology and representation

Every magazine has a target audience, based on the genre of music the magazine is based on. A magazine's design and use of fonts, graphics and colours will reflect the ideology of the genre.

An ideology is the beliefs a person or group stands by. Different genres will have different ideologies, which will effect how the magazine represents itself. For example, a pop music magazine will have bright colours, taking a positive social view, while a rock magazine will use clashing colours, and could have an antisocial tone that would be seen as negative.

Ways this affects magazines
The ideology of a genre of music can effect a music magazine greatly, as these cases show:

Pop Magazine

As these images show, pop magazines are colourful, and use a large image of a single person as their main attention grabbing piece. The models pictured usually look quite approachable and kind.

Rock Magazine

As shown, these magazines use fewer colours, but sometimes use brighter colours to contrast the main image. They also use a single model, or group of models, in the centre of the page, but their facial expression and general impression is far more menacing than the pop magazines.

Ideas for school magazine

After using popular music magazines to think of ideas to use for the front and contents page of my school magazine, i have decided to use one image on the front page, using a single model, with the articles advertised around the model. Alternatively I will have the a large image of my model, with the corresponding story in a box on the image, with the other stories inside in a box below the image. For the contents page I will use images to create a border for the page list, and the images will correspond to certain articles in the magazine. If I like the ideas that I use for this magazine, I may repeat them in my final piece.

Examples of school magazines

In this post I will go over good and bad methods of publishing a school magazine, using two different sources. I will focus on the aspects of a bad school magazine cover first, then move on to a better example.

This example is from a magazine called ‘The Loyalite’ which is an example of a poor school magazine. The title is small and in a font that is difficult to read due to the sweeping serifs, and there is no information regarding what is in the magazine itself, which means that there is no way of telling the quality of the writing inside the magazine. The image used on this cover is very minimalist, and makes the space on the cover seem larger than it is, making it seem emptier, regardless of the image on the cover.

This magazine cover is an improvement on my earlier example. The use of a bold, sans-serif font makes the masthead easy to read, while the picture taking up most of the space on the image allows the magazine to seem more professionally produced, which makes the magazine look better. This magazine also contains a barcode, which makes it look like a professional production.

Welcome to my blog

This is the blog I have created for my AS Media Studies coursework. In this blog I will create a school magazine as a preliminary task, and after this I will make a music magazine for my main piece. For my magazine I need to create a front page, a contents page and a double page spread