Evaluation 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

I am able to attract the reader's attention with the big and noticeable font which is a constant throughout the entire cover.
With regards to my target audience, I tried to use the contrasting colours of black and white to bring a lot of attention and a sense of importance to 'My Chemical Romance', which is an extremely well known rock band that has now disbanded. Any news about the inactive band is sure to grab the audience's attention, and I felt that it was the most important piece of news which is why I placed more focus on it.
I also made a cover line about another band, 'Three Days Grace'. I was able to have some fun with the band's name, and made a rhyme with it, so it should be catchy and make the reader interested.
At the bottom I have placed 'steal her look' which is a reference to a  recent meme that is commonly seen on social networking sites such as Tumblr and Twitter, the former having a heavy number of teenage users, which helps to appeal to my target audience which are in the teenage/young adult age range.
The free posters notification in the top left also attracts the audience, even people outside of my target audience since it's just human nature to want to have things.
The masthead has the word 'vex' which is a term used to define some negative emotions, and I felt that it would be a good word to use as my masthead since my target audience are stereotypically represented in the media to be quite negative and pessimistic overall (e.g. goths, emos). 'Nation' refers to how there is an extremely large rock music fanbase, and how the music has become influential enough to create its own subcultures globally.
The model himself is looking into the camera/reader, which directly addresses the reader and makes the audience feel more involved with the magazine.
Using information from my survey results, I decided the price of my magazine to be £2.99 because the average price that the respondents said they would pay for a magazine was £2-£2.99, and a few more respondents saying that they're willing to pay £3 and more, which is why I made the prices close to £3.

The contents page can capture attention with how the paper is black. In the other version of my contents page where I tried it with white paper, it looked to me like there was less content than there actually was, so using black paper should make it look like there's more content and keep the reader interested. Once again, I'm using colours to reach out to my audience where they enjoy the colour black. The use of wob (white on black) makes it easier for the text to be seen and therefore makes easier to be read.
From my survey results, I found that blue was the most favoured colour among the respondents, so I had to incorporate the colour blue into my contents page, but since my contents page is pretty plain, there wasn't much opportunity to do so. I used the semicircle for aesthetic purposes but also as an opportunity to incorporate the colour blue.

I think that I did a good job of producing content for my double page spread. I tried to use a variety of colours to make the double page spread eye-catching and very easy to read. I have also got an even distribution of colours on each side of the double page spread which should help out. The pattern-like layout of the far right questions gives it a solid look and the yellow helps it to further stand out from the rest of the double page spread.
I also added drop caps to indicate where the text starts, and it follows the norms and conventions of double page spreads.
I think the picture will grab a lot of attention with the model's position and how he is holding a weapon. This also fits in with the stereotype of rock-based social groups being delinquents and being dangerous, as he is holding a dangerous weapon that can be seen on members of the represented social groups within the media.

In terms of language, I originally thought that I would have to be informal, but social media sites have shown me that a lot of teenagers/young adults (target audience age range for the magazine) and not actually as ignorant as the mass media portrays. Their age range's stereotypes of illiteracy stems from how the introduction of social media sites have introduced an online exclusive language where words are shortened (e.g. your/you're = ur, what you up to = wuu2), but this type of text is sometimes forced. For example, Twitter has a 140 character limit per tweet, which may mean that the person is forced to shorten their words to fit their statement into the 140 character limit. Nevertheless, people within this age range have shown on numerous occasions that they are actually intelligent, especially when making a rant or expressing negative emotions, and these negative emotions are also usually associated with the social groups being represented by my magazine.