Research and Planning
ü How did you think about target audience?
I decided that my target audience will be the parents of the students attending my school ‘The Blair academy’.
As the magazine is mainly for parents I designed it with mainly with toned down colours instead of very bright shocking colours, as I think that this would suit older peoples’ taste more.
I knew I wanted to use black as a base, put I wasn’t sure what colours I should use with it. I have experimented with blues, greens and reds to see how they look on the cover. The red looked quite good, but I felt that mixing red with black is just too common, but blue and green on their own looked very plain, and made the whole magazine look very boring.
Here is a colour scheme of my cover:
In the end I used blues and greens mixed together and white for the text, but I put a pink stroke around my main title to make it more eye-catching and to clearly show that it’s the most important thing.
Considering my magazine is for adults I also made sure that the language used is mainly formal, without slang, so that everyone can easily understand it.
As I decided to make my school a language college, I made the main story a trip to Italy. The image I used on the cover is one of Vienna, as I though that this will represent the story very well and if parents will see a nice photo of Italy they might be more persuaded to let their children go on the school trip.
In my Content page I used a very similar colour scheme as in the cover as I wanted the magazine to have the same style throughout. Again I made it pretty simple, as I only added text in the middle. I didn’t want the contents page to look to busy and crowded as I wanted to looks similar to the cover which is quite simple as well.
I also added a little bit of information about the articles under the headers, so that you can easily know what’s included in the magazine so you can decide whether you want to read it or not.
ü Photoshop and InDesign
I found using Adobe Photoshop pretty simple and I used it to make my logo and content page as it’s a good program to draw out your ideas. I didn’t really feel that comfortable with InDesign, as I found it really hard to move some of the elements around as often I got confused on the layers. But I think that it’s a good program for designing layouts.
