Planning my College Magazine

Before actually designing the front cover and contents page for my college magazine I needed to plan for it. As a class, we designed a questionnaire targeted at the college students. This included questions like "How much would you pay?", "What would you like to see in it?" and "How often should it be released?". We each got results and collaborated them into a class set of results from which to base our college magazines on.

From the results of the questionnaire we discovered that:

• the magazine should cost £1
• the magazine should be released monthly
• the most popular content would be local gig reviews, sport, game reviews and movie reviews
• the most popular genres of music are Indie, Rock and Metal
• there should be a balanced amount of pictures and writing
• students should be on the front cover
• the college magazine should have a mixture of serious and jokey tones
• and the most popular existing magazine is Kerrang

This gave me the basis on what to include in my magazine, and suggests what kind of coverlines and imagery my magazine should include.

We also analysed an existing college magazine cover on Flickr. This gave us more ideas of what they should include and gave us a sense of direction as they were actual college magazines so we could learn from the layout and style of the cover.

Before actually making the front cover, I needed to plan for it. I needed to think of a name, a layout and some coverlines. I thought of the name 'Zoom' because it's a short, cool name and connotes quick, simple information delivered straight to the reader. I planned a layout that is similar to existing magazine cover: it is simple is quite grid-like. The masthead would be at the top, with the price in the top-right hand corner, the coverlines would be on the left side of the main body of the cover and the image would be on the right side and middle. The neat, grid-like structure of the cover would suggest seriousness and straight-forwardness. The coverlines would be based on the results of the questionnaire, so titles like 'Teacher Interviews" and "Gigs" would be present.