Planning my College Magazine

Research

Research is important in any project as it could make a product very successful or a failure. For this magazine task, I undertook research in the form of Internet research, a questionnaire and the study of previous college magazines.

Internet research was simple enough, I looked up successful college magazines and analysed what it was that made them successful. Generally I came to the conclusion that college students want something attractive, fun and informative. This gave me the clear idea that my magazine needs to be fun, but different to stand out of the crowd.

The questionnaire allowed me to get personal opinion from the public. I went around giving out the questionnaire, which included questions about what they would prefer to see in a magazine (e.g. film reviews over music reviews). After collecting the results there was a clear link with my Internet research, many people asked for music and band interviews and having a general fun magazine, but also wanted it to be keep quite informative about college. It was just finding the balance between being fun and informal and trying to provide serious information.

I looked over a previous college magazine called 'soup', I choose it because it was the most eye catching. I looked over it and did an analysis of it on Flickr.com, this made it easy to divide and study. Once again I noticed a fun theme (like the title, making a pun about the wealth and diet of students) and music and such other things on it. One thing that I really noticed was the bright colour, red, this was used to great effect to make things stand out. Also the creation of the piece was very cool and visually pleasing. Over all adding to my ideas for a college magazine (fun, informal, informative and visually interesting).

Planning

After doing this research I started on the planning of my magazine. Immediately I decided I would not have a 'run of the mill', boring magazine, so decided to do something visually different. I jotted down sketches of my design and wrote down a list of what i wanted it to look like and achieve. For example: colours, audience, layout. I decided that the best way to make my college magazine how I wanted it in my head, was to just play around with photo shop, so I knew how to make all the individual elements. This worked effective as I learnt a lot of knew skills, which helped later on. Although I did have a brief layout of what I wanted to do at the start, this of course changed and was tweaked when I actually made the piece. But I still referred to my original notes and sketches for help and an imaginative boost.