Gossip Girl Magazine

Preliminary Magazine Cover Evaluation.
For this piece of work, I worked in a small group of 3 with Minty, and Emily. We decided we wanted to create a girl’s school magazine, and so made a rough plan of what we would go onto create. As part of the group I was the hands on designer of the magazine, Minty and Emily planned it out, told me their vision and I created it using photoshop. Photoshop was the best computer program to use as their are infinite things you can create with it, also it works very well when creating a magazine, as alike magazines Photoshop works in layers.
We wanted a cover that would initially draw in the girl’s rather than the boy’s so we had to think of a colour palette that was stereotypical for a girl, but attractive at the same time. We chose pink and yellow, as background colours, and grey and black for the Masthead and the cover lines. We chose a darker colour as it would contrast against the light pink and stand out, and also it does infact look quite attractive.
To keep an informal, casual style we chose Rosewood Std, I personally like this as it stands out clearly to the magazines target audience, and it is fun looking. The secondary font we chose to use was Bell Mt, this is a lighter font that is quite flowy in form, and still sits pretty on the page, rather than harshly standing out. We chose to use just two fonts as to keep with the initial conventions of a magazine, although many magazine companies choose to use 3, we felt in context two was enough, as we had chosen to swap the colours around which gives the font different effects on the page anyway.
The photograph used is of a content looking, laid-back girl. This makes the audience feel comfortable, rather than photographing a straight faced, stuck up looking girl as this can be seen as intimidating and this is the last affect we wish to have upon our audience.
In terms of the cover lines we tried to keep them short and sweet, as the target audience we are aiming at will not be attracted by long boring lines of information, they tend to want to know the basic details, and if it interests them they’l read on, I know this primarily as the target audience we were aiming for, I actually fit into.
I feel that the magazine cover is clever as it draws in new and regular readers. Regular readers will see the coverline “Interview with Molly Captain of the Geek Squad,” and will already have some idea of who Molly is in more detail, whilst a new reader will probably not know anything about her anyway, either way they can both be interested in the interview as she is the main subject of the front cover.
I feel that this magazine would definitely be distributed within a certain school, as there are promotions such as the ‘Trip to New York,’ which would only be running at one particular school, so really this would be pointless to sell at other places.
Overall I think that the magazine cover is a success, I think it is aesthetically attractive, but gives the needed information too, i.e. barcode, price, edition. I also think that it is a healthy magazine, as there are many problems highlighted in the media that focus on underweight rolemodels that are printed on the front of magazines, whilst we have a healthy normal looking girl. I think the way we could have improved upon it is by using a more detailed background, as it looks pretty, but quite plain as it is, another way it could have been improved is by having photographs for the coverlines, e.g. a photograph of New York, for the coverline: “New York trip coming soon!” this would have improved the affect of the magazine as a lot of younger people look for photographs rather than writing. Other than that I think the magazine as it fits the target audience’s stereotype, is attractive anyway and gives the basic details of whats included inside.