Expectations of a College Magazine

On The front cover I need to proceed to meet the following expectations of out target audience, in this instance it needs to meet the expectations of students from the age demographic of 16-18 year olds as that is the age demographic of most students attending British college. The front cover needs to be visually appealing for our target audience to draw them in and gain interest, to do this we need to create a colorful front cover as that is what our target audience expects to gain interest so we will use a juicy colorful background using a bright colour such as green or yellow. It is important to try and use “neutral” colours and not to stray off to more masculine or feminine colours such as blue or pink as that can alienate some of our demographic within our target audience as it can make them feel uncomfortable for picking up the magazine. Next we need to add in a model, the model will need to be above the background layer but not in front of any important text as we do not want to black important text for our target audience to read. The size of the picture of the model will need to take up most of the magazine cover in terms of a picture as the model can also visually draw our target audience in to reading the magazine. Also the model will need to be a college student or an ex-college student to fulfill audience expectations and it fills audience expectations because our audience would expect someone within the college to be on a college magazine. The college logo needs to be on the magazine as it shows who has created the magazine. The college logo could also be the main title of the magazine as it shows easily who created the magazine for our target audience and it also creates an image of what our audience would expect from this magazine, which is an image of college related topics and items as that is what the audience would expect from a college magazine. The font of the magazine will need to be a large chunky but formal for titles such as Franklin Gothic Medium so that it gains the attention of our target audience but also to make the magazine title readable so that our target audience can read the magazine, it also allows older readers to be able to read it without feeling discomfort as a more chunky but less formal text such as Bauhaus 93 could be viewed as childish and more appealing to a younger audience and also harder to read for an older audience. The tile will need to be in layer 2 or layer 4, as it will need to overlap all other images within the cover of the magazine. The required amount of titles would be 2-3 titles with following text for each paragraph at size 14, one of these titles should contain context to the main model image and can be at a bigger size of 16 than the other tries so that it will be the first title that the audience will read as the audience expectation would be that the biggest title will relate to the image of the model. For the text, the text will need to be at size 12, and this is to make sure that the text will not fill the magazine cover as that will create a visual eyesore for our target audience and therefore may draw away our target audience, also to keep the text as short as possible to one small paragraph of 3-4 line per title so that it will not fill the magazine cover with text. For the contents I will need to follow general expectations of what a contents will look like so that it will meet target audience expectations whilst also being informative and functional to my target audience. My background will need to be more of a calmer colour than the cover as there will be more text within the contents page than the cover with have, also we will still require that that background will need a neutral colour such as white so that the target audience will not feel discomfort reading the magazine and will also be functional as the reader can still read the magazine. As following expectation in a contents page I will require page reference numbers to articles throughout the magazine and this fulfills audience expectations because as provides and informative guide about what types of topics will be covered within the magazine, the font style will be the just like the text on the cover so that its easier for the target audience to adjust to reading the contents within each article on each page. The size of the contents will be size 12 as there will be much more text than there will be on the front cover as there will be more articles to cover. The text of the contents will be on layer 3 as the text will need o be above any images and background. The titles for each article must be at a larger text size than the size of the text to an article to show differentiation between articles visually so that it is easier for my target audience to read the contents page but also to create visual appeal so that a title to a certain article may gain more interest to certain demographics to our target audience than other articles, for example certain demographics within the target audience who are more interested in Media Studies may want to read articles relevant to Media Studies than someone who is Interested in law and may want to read articles related to Law. The colour of the text should be contrasting to the colour of the background so that it makes the text easier to read for the target audience. I need to include an image within the contents page so it keeps the attention to our target audience by making the contents page more visually appealing. The image should be on layer 1 or 2 as it is meant to be above the background layer but the image should not be on top of the text so that it makes the text easier to read. The image size should be at largest at the most 2/3 of the page as I do not need a large image and must be away fro the text so that it can contrast with the text, keeping the contents page organized and not cluttered and still visually appealing.