Magazine Pre Production

The task we were given was to design our own school magazine cover and contents page, the magazine's target audience is people at our school (age 14-18). In preparation for this task we had to bring a magazine to the lesson, and look at the way the front page and contents page were set out to give us some idea on the layouts of magazines. For inspiration I went on sites such as Vogue, Elle, Grazia and NME. The covers that caught my attention the most were these ones below from Vogue. I like them because they use strong colours, eye catching pictures on the front and I am interested in what they are wearing. My favorite one is the one of Agyness Deyn ( middle row on the left ) because of the colour palette and the word 'dazzle' caught my attention.

Obviously I wont have a model on the front of my school magazine because its a school magazine and thats not going to get the attention from all of my target audience and I don't have the money. The ideas i did get from these covers was the bright colours, especially the contrasting colours of the cover on the first row on the left because they aren't two colours you'd put together but they work. They catch people's eyes and make them want to read on, to I kept that in mind. I then had to decide if I was going to do a general magazine or focus on a specific subject, I couldn't think of a name so i decided to choose drama because its a subject I do and you can do more with it, as I reckon a drama magazine about shows and actors sounds better and would interest my target market more than an English magazine about books and writing. I decided to call my magazine 'DramaRama' because it says what subject it is and you'd know straight away if you are interested in it. It doesn't sound deadly serious but I know that at our age, as a school magazine you dont want something deadly serious and a bit heavy to read. I know that not everybody in the school reads the school magazine, I for example haven't read our school magazine so by targeting a specific subject the people that are likely to read this are people who are interested in drama. Drama isn't a subject that is entirely serious, whereas maths and science is. In my opinion you can have fun in Drama, and I wanted my magazine to portray that. This was the mock up of what I basically wanted my magazine to look like (picture above). I already knew I was going to use Becca as my model at this point so that was one less decision I had to make during the production, because the more decisions I made before I wouldn't have to make in the production which would make it smoother and easier.