Magazine Evaluation

Magazine Analysis-
At one stage in one of Louisa’s lesson were asked to analyse a ‘Women Weeklies’ magazine. We came up with the conclusions that the target group was aimed at about 40-65 year old female pensioners; who were not necessarily educated. We also came up with other ideas regarding the content of the magazine. We had to identify the main things that are included on the front covers of magazines and say why we thought they had such relevance. After looking at a magazine cover as a class ,we all noticed that the front cover had a very important role as it has to communicate enough to the target audience in order for the to buy it . These are some important features that are expected to be on the front cover of magazine;
• A main image
• Colours
• Sub-headings (Sell Line)
• Mast head
• Banner-(strap Line)
• Different fonts
These and many more things are included on magazines covers in order to have a strong audience appeal.

With these given circumstances creating a magazine cover didn’t seem like an easy task as a lot of thought had to go into our work in order for it to be successful and appealing. We ensure that our magazine cover had many of the above and more features that we found on other magazine. The front cover has different fonts, a website; sell lines, a main image, a barcode (date and issue number), bright attractive colours and many more in order to have a strong chance with our audience.
However our magazine was in some ways different. We were all given the instructions to only use two images from the internet and as many as we wanted from our photo shoot. This established to be different as it was challenging the forms and conventions of real music magazines. The fact that I was the main person for the photo shoot also affected it because it is unusual to see only one face on the front cover of a magazine; it is boring and unattractive to many. These are when we started to struggle slightly. We had to carefully decide where we would put these two images and what we could use from the photo shoot without over boring the audience.


The main image on the magazine cover is a representation of many teenagers over the world. The use of colours relates to those individuals who have creative personalities and ideas within them. Our picture in particular is suppose to show the attitude and outburst that many teens have in them also showing that it’s okay to be who you are no matter what people say. The main image on our music magazine cover had a role in communication with teenagers, making them feel as if they can relate to this urban artist ‘Shauntae’ .Using eye contact with the camera was the best solution we had in order to achieve this.

The audience for this magazine varies from about 13-18 year olds females. This is simply because the magazine itself is a guide line for growing up also covering all the issues that teenage girls go through.
In every issue of ‘Urban Vybez’ we tackle some of the daily issues that teenage girls face and try our best to give them advice. ‘Urban Vybez’ mainly covers issues such as , boy drama, choosing the best college, sex, drugs , music and many other related topics.
‘Urban Vybez’ magazine is published every Friday mornings, giving teens the chance to taken in the advices over the weekend and start fresh on Monday mornings.

The decision to use bright colours for the music magazine front cover was to attract out target audience. The aim was for the magazine to stand out wherever they are distributed making people fall in love with the cover alone and then buy it. We wanted to attract our target group with the main image and that’s why it was decided that I looked directly in the camera to make the audience feel connected with the artist.

Developing the front cover an inside page of the music magazine came with many difficulties especially given the fact that I had to use a software that I was completely new to. Adobe Photoshop proved to be complicated and confusing to function in some ways. Although Mickey and Marisa gave the class demonstrations on how we could use to program to create different effects it was still a challenge.
Photoshop became very interesting and useful as the process of developing our magazine covers progress and I became comfortable using it. When I reached my comfort zone with the program my creative side started to show and many improvised ideas started flowing in my head as to how we could definitely make the magazine communicate with the audience.
It was through experimenting on Photoshop that we created many of our effects for example our content page background was made from scratch using Photoshop elements. We also ……..or image to the next side so that we could create more space to write and place important features for the magazine.
The program was a huge help to our magazine and thanks to Louisa, Mickey, Mary, Marisa and my other class peers (Alethea))for the tremendous advice they contributed. I am officially proud to say that I created an outstanding magazine front cover and inside page.


My partner and I had the opportunity to do a lot of panning over the weekend on the practical before hand, however this never happened. After the weekend we both came for the photo shoot and discovered that neither of us had done anything planned. We didn’t decide on anything, a title, genre, theme or simple even the content of the magazine itself. We had put very minimum thought into our magazine and immediately it became a worry.
The majority of our photo shoot process was improvised until the point I came up with a retro theme due to the range of colours I was wearing that day. After this point the posing became easier for me as I was already developing the content of the magazine in my head. We were very happy with the outcome of out pictures and to an extent it boosted my confidence allowing me to think that we would create an outstanding front cover for our magazine.
Although our magazine cover and inside cover wasn’t a disaster I really do think that me and my partner Topaz could have prepared and organised our self more. Due to the lack of planning we constructed a lot of our own time was taken away in order for us to complete our music magazine to an acceptable standard according to us. I promise myself that the next time we have anything similar to this project I will construct myself in a better manner in if I have to I will most definitely take charge of the situation and do all the planning if I have to. I am prepared to do anything in order to save time on my next assignment and it is very clear to me now that planning can take you a long way. Without all the stressing!!