Planning: Pitch and Moodboard

My product should meet the brief, as environmental issues make up a large section of current affairs. I will utilise the common codes and conventions of print and online magazines to provide a sense of verisimilitude. The magazine should be aimed at 'a socially-conscious, 16-25, middle to upmarket demographic'. Consumers that meet this description are typically very involved in learning about and improving the environment, with many being active and attending protests.

The audience should be very involved with the magazine; including the offline product, online product and on social media. The website will contain links to various social media pages, providing further audience engagement. There will be a clear sense of branding, including the masthead, colour palette, typography, etc. As well as focusing on the environment, I would like gender to be the focus of one of the issues I produce, as I want to engage many people within the 16-25 demographic. 

I will use digital convergence to engage the 16-25 demographic and will use social media, online and offline. I will create social media pages for the magazine to improve the digital convergence aspect. I will produce original audio-visual content for the website, that will link to the brand identity of the print magazine.

Planning: Reflection on moderators' report

Brief 3: Magazines and Online

1. Statement of intent: make clear links between the two main products and explain how digital convergence would connect them - go into great depth about how and why particular effects would be created and how these ideas linked to ideas explored elsewhere in the course (for example, theorists or particular products). The very best make clear links between the two main products and explains how digital convergence would connect the two. These also tend to go through the brief in-depth, demonstrating how every requirement and detail was to be addressed.

2. Create a 50/50 balance between the offline and online product

3. Use a variety of images in the magazine's contents page - The production detail to be included in the magazine work was specified as at least four different images using original photography across the covers and contents; a different setting for each cover; at least two models representing at least two different social groups; a call to action pointing readers to the website

4. Show features of more 'cutting edge' magazines - The stronger magazines chose their fonts with discrimination (not relying on standard body-text fonts to create sell lines or the masthead) and showed control in terms of size and leading. The best work used a variety of images on the contents, with page numbers on the images anchoring them to the written contents, and appropriately laid out and sized text. 

5. Observe official Dennis magazines to capture a sense of verisimilitude within my product - conduct focused research into the codes and conventions, such as assessing the conventional size for text on a contents page, this did results in much more appropriate work which compared favourably with professional productions. Such magazines had clearly been inspired by existing examples from Bauer and captured a sense of verisimilitude. 

6. Adhere to codes and conventions of magazines and the genre - meet the conventional expectations of the genre.

7. Use many different settings when shooting footage

8. Reference the website - cross-platform convergence 

9. Use effective, bespoke photography and copy, often capturing a tone appropriate to the needs of the intended audience, with a degree of sophistication being clear

10. Slightly challenge norms - Most magazines understood the requirement to appeal to an AB audience and there were some inventive approaches to this. Many of the magazines constructed representations really well, with subtle but thoughtful differences around nationality, class, aspiration as well as ethnicity and gender. Some of the most interesting work questioned issues of normative gender stereotypes

Magazine Cover Practise 2

Magazine Cover Practise