Student magazine evaluation

The target audience for my magazine are students or any young outgoing person with an active social life. The masthead was the first piece of ammunition for attracting my target audience. The title “I Love College” is true as my audience are students but ironic in the fact that the sort of students that the content of my magazine will interest, may have a more cynical view of education. I used a graffiti background as this will appeal to the young rebelish consumers and also portraits the nature of the magazine well. The cover lines used will also appeal to the target audience due to the use of slang/nicknaming. Then the use of alliteration in the strap lines is relatively catchy and is used with the intention that it will cement itself into a readers mind. I’ve also challenged the wants/needs of the target audience by using quotations as an ongoing trend throughout my cover and contents, by using these more intellectual quotes it links my magazine more to the life of a student rather than just a person of the similar age category.
The demographic profile of my audience will be solely person who are attached to further education and the student social scene. Then my psychographic profile as stated before will consist of people;
• Who love college
• Between the ages of 16-21
• Who go on nights out without any idea of how they are getting home
• Who are constantly looking for savings
• Who prefer action to romance
• Who celebrate occasions with a weekend with no sleep rather than the family
• Who are able to distinguish the difference between different genres of music
• Who appreciate having a good time, with no regards to consequence.
When constructing my magazine cover and contents page we used images and themes that relate to both college and social life for young people. The use of bright colours on a dark background was used to grab the eyes of potential consumers when sat on a self with other magazines. Due to the nature and design of the cover this shouldn’t look similar to any other mainstream magazine and could easily be recognised as a young person’s mag.
The use of new technologies like the internet made my work easier as information and ideas was easy to obtains to give me a guideline when choosing a design plan. Also the new found knowledge of ‘photoshop’ and ‘quarkexpress’ made editing photos and constructing an attractive and effective layout much easier. Using tools such as the magnetic lasso for example allowed me to manipulate/crop images for specific uses and effects. Also using the smudge tool allowed me to alter detail on images making the image appear more professional when being used for my final work.

College magazine cover:

College magazine contents page: