I saw on the front cover of a Q magazine a little box which says 100 albums reviewed and thought this would be a nice touch for my magazine front cover. Below you can see Q magazines version and my own replicated version.

                                                              
                                          

My Logo

I created this logo in Photoshop and was mainly influenced by Q magazine. I think the whole one word logo works really ell and can be easily remembered seeing as theres no words to try and remember. This is my final logo design.

Lesson 4

During this lesson i started my double page spread and finished my second draft of my front cover. This didn't take me too long seeing as i came in during the half term for a few hours to get the first draft finished. then i managed to get my second draft finished. Finally, the next stage now would be to start my contents page and get a few drafts posted on my blog to see which one works best.

Double page spread

The next thing i had to create was a double page spread for my music magazine. Below you can see my first draft with no images. However I have blue boxes to show where I could place my images.

This is my second draft but I think personally I may have to change all of the font to white and not half black half white. This is going to be my final front cover as I like this design rather than plain white.

This is my first draft of my front cover. The things that I would change would maybe make the main coverline bigger and stand out more. Then I would make the two below cover lines stand out more but reduce them in size. I would also make the top right corner magazine name and barcode smaller and make the image more right aligned. Above you can see the changes.

Audience within a magazine

Audience

Three trends in news magazine circulation and readership stand out.

First, readership surveys indicate that the audience for news magazines is holding steady, while the audience for pop culture, entertainment and lifestyle magazines is growing. This fits with the trends in ad pages and revenues and suggests one of two things: Either the market for news magazines is more or less at its capacity or the genre needs to be reinvented.

Second, despite changes in content designed to grab younger readers, the audience for news magazines is aging - more than for most other magazine genres. News magazine readers are also more affluent than magazine readers overall, but that is not a big consolation financially. Advertisers are often looking for youth more than money, particularly in general interest magazines like the news weeklies.

Third, while the big three news magazines are finding it hard to increase their circulation, a few smaller circulation books that focus on news and public affairs have found steady growth over the past 15 years. This may suggest that the genre is ripe for change and indeed that the news magazine audience, or at least part of it, is looking for a new approach.

Who is Gaining and Who is Not

Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear division among magazine genres - those that are rising and those that are sitting still. Readership figures from Mediamark Research, the leading U.S. provider of syndicated consumer magazine audience data, indicate that since 1995 the entertainment and pop culture genre has gained popularity.¹ Interest in the news and business genres has remained flat.

Both news and entertainment magazines trended down in readership from 1995 until 2000. Then both categories began to rise again. But the increase in entertainment magazines was much more substantial, increasing 14 percent from 2000 to 2003.²News rose only 9 percent in the same period.³

Business magazines followed an opposite course. These magazines grew in readership from 1995, peaked in 2000 and then began to fall off.

Part of this is explained by the dying off of some magazines that were riding the success of the stock market and the technology boom. But other losses may have more to do with the fact that, when the market dipped, people stopped looking at their copies of Forbes and Fortune. For many readers, no news on their 401(k) was better than the bad news.

The figures also may suggest some shifting going on from genre to genre. Readers have only a certain amount of time to devote to magazines. If that time is not going to one genre, it's going to another. News and entertainment benefited from readers turning away from business publications.

But the uptick in entertainment readership is too sharp to be the result of falling business readership alone. It also follows logically another basic theory about media. If more of the media agenda is focused on lifestyle and entertainment, it increases interest in those areas. The media is both reflecting and reinforcing a broader cultural shift toward celebrity, entertainment and infotainment.

Finally, it is important you understand who your audience are and who is going to gain from reading your magazine before you even think about creating a new magazine.