Month: October 2020

For this post I have found a lot of inspiration for what I want my magazine to look like. I have found styles, colours photos and genre conventions I’d like to follow. The genre conventions I like come predominantly from my Star Images, of Drake. This photos of him demonstrate both ordinary and extraordinary features I would like to connote in my photos I take. I would also like to be able to display a meta-narrative with some of these photos too, as I feel this is a strong and affective technique.

After researching on Pinterest I have come to realise the conventional colour and style used by this genre(rap/hip-hop). This assists me a lot in catching and retaining the eye of my target audience, and it’s important I am aware at what the lack of these colours or conventional features may harm my sales or ratings. I need to make sure I use these colours and styles (my denotations) effectively, and that the meaning and usage behind them is clear (the connotation). This will give my magazine a brand, it will represent and display my magazine.

Here are some photos that I aim to have my cover photo represent or look like. These photos are good as they all have some conventional features, even if some are different features. A lot of them are clearly showing a degree of wealth with the chains and jewelry being well represented, with the hip-hop style of fashion clearly on show too. You can see this with some of the links between sport, as well as the baggy and very loud clothing.

This is my research on You.gov about 3 artists that are involved in the rap/hip-hop scene. These images below display their viewers age and features, it also show’s their other interests about music, TV shows, what they read and search and other famous celebs they are interested in.

Drake’s Audience

Kanye West’s Audience

Snoop Doggs Audience

After researching on You.gov I have found out a lot about my target audience, and how effective finding the brand and genre of your target is to being successful. This will assist me in my magazine and the branding and USP of my magazine. This helps me detect the language, colour schemes and backgrounds to use. It identifies the audience and shows me how to catch their eye, and retain their attention.

I will use quite a strong font, to interest and attract my audience, however I will also use big names and have photo of big artists, therefore many viewers will take a liking and interest to the product. This will encode the fans of this artist to the magazine, it decodes to that they will get the impression it would be of their preferred reading as their favourite artist or an artist they have a lot of interest in is involved.

My magazine will be styled around a conventional hip-hop/rap theme. This is because I listen to a lot of this music, and understand the features and techniques quite well.

Possible names I have come up with for my magazine are;

viZion

Wrapped

Wrap of Rap

Wrap Up

This is my Word Cloud, it has words that relate to genre and contents of my mag, what these artists go through before they reach the top.

The brand of my magazine will be of promotion, promoting a lot of upcoming artists and talking their story, trying to draw the attention to these young artists. Talking about their music, and where it comes from, what their lyrics mean and connote, getting to know them on a a deeper level. This is my USP (unique selling point), as everyone is always looking to find new artists, therefore people will be interested in this mag, they will also be interested into finding out more on their favourite artists so this too will attract them to the magazine.

My mission statement is to give a platform to the people who are young and underprivileged, who have the talent they just don’t know how to utilise it. Give them a ‘viZion’ in what they can do, give them a brand, promote their work. Yet it will also include all the latest news and releases from all the most popular artists and news reports and interviews from them.

Here you can see my analysis of the ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine’s cover starring Harry Styles. As you can see I broke down the different aspects of the cover and came up with a fair bit. I say about how multiple demographic/psychographic groups may have been targeted by the cover. Furthermore I speak into the connotations that make me feel this and convey this message to me.

As you can see this magazine cover is very diverse and inclusive, which is potentially a very strong marketing technique, as Harry Styles represents modern day pop-culture, whilst this isn’t really the genre of the Rolling Stone mag.

As well as this, despite me not touching on it, the cover holds many conventional design features of a magazine cover, therefore attracting and boasting even more content to attract customers.

After studying this magazine cover, I have gauged multiple different ways to draw in the attention of your target audience as well as widening your target audience. As well as this I now know how important it is to know your audience, as if you don’t you may get it all wrong and they may not like it, therefore they may begin to lose interest and if you keep on making the same mistakes they may start to completely fall out of love with your magazine brand. I also know how this will help me have a more well structured and interesting magazine cover for when I come around to it. Finally it also enables me to understand and be able to deconstruct poses and stances of cover stars, and how this may be engaging to customers, especially when the person is a model or creates a lot of their popularity from their appearance.