Practical Production

For my practical production I have chosen to produce a woman’s magazine featuring true to life stories. I chose to produce this genre of magazine as I think it would appeal to my target audience, which are females preferably aged 20+. According to my research females read magazines more than males. So by producing a magazine focused on females I thought that my magazine would be read by more people than if I produced a magazine aimed at males.

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This type of magazine is preferred by housewives and females aged 20+. This is because housewives normally read magazines to escape from housework and other females read magazines in their break at work. Even though I am not in the target audience range, I still feel confident enough to produce this genre of magazine as I read them frequently. By producing a magazine that I know the genre of made it easier for me to make my own magazine. I made this magazine because I wanted to know what it was like to produce a magazine and how much effort you had to put into it. This now means that whenever I read a magazine I appreciate it more because I just think about how much effort had been put into making it.

Research: To help me with the making of my magazine, I had to do some research. The research I conducted was browsing the internet looking at other women’s magazines, in the same genre. A couple of the websites I visited were www.thatslife.co.uk and also www.takeabreak.co.uk. This helped me a lot because I could observe the layout of the front cover and the way it was produced. I also looked at other magazines of the same genre; this helped me because I could look at the contents page closely and look at the layout and also the colours used.

Another piece of research I done was to conduct a questionnaire and print off numerous and give them to various people to fill out. When I got the questionnaires back and wrote up the results, I noticed that this was the best research I had done. This was because it revealed what males and females preferred to read and look at, which meant it helped me understand what I needed to include in my project. For example, my results illustrated that the frequency of buying a magazine was weekly. The results of my questionnaire also told me that people would normally only spend between 1 and 2 on a magazine, this helped me to price my project. Also, I found out that most people liked to read their magazine at home and in the evening. This was useful as I could insert pages in my project that related to things to do in the evening to help you unwind and relax.

Cover: I chose the title “lip gloss” for my magazine as I think it will appeal to middle aged women as they normally wear lip stick/gloss. Another reason for this title was because you apply lip gloss on your lips and you talk from your lips. This connotes that my magazine has some gossip inside it and real people talking about real life stories. On the front cover of my magazine the colour of the copy is pink. The reason I chose the colour pink was because it is a girly colour and therefore appeals to my target audience. I have made the outline of the copy white so it makes the copy stand out more because white against pink stands out.

The image in the background is my own photography. The image is of a real person so this relates to the genre of the magazine as it is about real life stories. The colour of the image is a soft brown. The reason I chose the colour brown on top of the image is because it’s a calm relaxing colour. The cover lines on my front page are grouped together so that they look neat and presentable. The effect of grouping the cover lines together helps the reader to read them better. This is because they are all in one placing, grouped down the sides, and not just placed anywhere on the front page of my magazine. I also

made sure that the cover lines did not overlap the girl in the image. The copy of my cover lines are in bold so that they stand out more and get noticed by the target audience. The main story in my magazine is made to stand out the most on the front cover so I have made some of the copy larger than the rest. I think by doing this it will grab the eye of the target audience because the cover line on the front page for the main story says “The Shocking Secret behind this teenagers eyes!” but I only made “The Shocking Secret” larger. This will make females buy the magazine as they will want to find out what the “Shocking Secret” is.

The image on the front cover is my own photography. The main reason I have used my own photography is because the genre of my magazine is to feature real life stories. My image relates to the genre of the magazine because it is a photograph of a real person. If I had used an image of a celebrity, it would not have related to the genre because my magazine does not feature anything about celebrities. I have made my magazine issue #1. I thought this would be a good idea to do because if my target audience notice a new magazine on the shelves of shops, they might buy it because they would want to find out if it’s a good enough magazine to buy regularly. By being issue #1 my magazine would have to feature, really good stories to grab the target audience.