getting closer and closer

Wooo! My magazine is almost done. (kind of) Being that it is getting closer to the end I started working on the last portion of the project, the two page story.  I found a website called Flip Snack that gave me a bunch of different layouts I can use for my story. This website was actually really helpful in this process. These are two different layout that I might use for my story. Right now I am leaning more towards the first one because it is really simple and I really like it. But I might add a picture or two on the right side of the page. I like the second one too but I feel like the picture on the right side is a little too big.

FINAL TWO WEEKS!

So now that is the final two weeks I have to start creating my actual magazine. I first started by creating the cover (which i blogged about already) but I did change a few things in my cover. Then I started with the table of contents which i am not done with but I do know what my layout is. And finally my two page story. In my cover i did change a few things. One thing I changed was the color of the title. We made it hot pink. But of course we didn't just pick pink out of no where because we all know we can't just do that. We got inspiration from STRONG magazine. The picture is black and white (something that I also changed about my cover page) and the cover lines are white with a little bit of color like yellow or pink. The color red we had in our original design was too masculine and this isn't a magazine for men it is a women's magazine. This is what we came up with. This picture still isn't the definite picture I'm going to use. I'm going to take new pictures this weekend and see which ones I like more.

Table of Contents

Along with creating the the front cover we started looking at designs for the table of contents. We learned that in all issues of a certain magazine the table of contents are exactly the same layout so that is why we wanted to do it together. There was one table of contents that we found online that we really liked but we have to figure out how to design it. This picture to the right is the example of the table of contents that we really liked. The other two pictures below are the ones we liked from Canva.

On Friday I had met with my group to talk about what we are going to do as our front cover. Being that we all have the same magazine ,just different issues, we know that each cover has to be the same exact layout, font, and design. So we started designing the front cover together. We designed it on Canva. We already picked a font that we liked but because we are doing it on Canva we can't download the font so we just picked one from Canva that we liked. W

Practice makes perfect

So after all the research I had done I decided I wanted to start working on some drafts of my final magazine cover. So I went onto Canva and started to design my front cover. So here are some of the ones I created. Of course these are not the final drafts they are just ideas. I still don't know about the font. I don't think I like it. I want to download the font my group picked but I don't know how to download onto Canva.

I want to know everything about my target audience for my magazine and all the genre conventions so I decided to look for more information. I knew a lot but I didn't know as much as I wanted to know. So instead of keeping it traditional and searching it up on Google I did it a different way. Well I work at grocery store, Publix. So when I am working on the register and I don't have any customers I have to go to the front of my line so people know I'm open. Instead of just standing there like I usually do I decided to look at all the different magazines on the racks. On the covers of most magazine , and not just fitness ones, there is usually a cover line with a number in it. The number is usually larger font than the rest of the title. The number being larger makes it stick out to the readers eye so that they are intrigued in the story. Other things I noticed was if it is a celebrity on the front cover they are most likely looking directly into the camera. I know that these tactics work because I was checking somebody out and she starts talking about one of the magazines and is so interested. She said "This is where I get all my celebrity gossip from."

Today I started researching different programs I can do my magazine on. First i looked into Joomag. But I encountered a problem. It is not free anymore and Joomag was my number one choice. I had somebody from last year show me how to do it Because I thought maybe I was doing something wrong. But she even said it had changed. So Joomag is not one of my choices anymore. Then the next one I looked into was canva. Canva right now is my number one choice but I'm still doing some more research to see if there is a better program I can use.

This wasn't the only thing I did today. I decided I wanted to know more about my target audience so I know exactly what I should be doing in my magazine. I came across this website.
http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/article/market-focus-fitness-enthusiasts-28722/
I learned that most fitness magazines are read by fitness enthusiasts. Most of these people are middle aged women who are college educated. These are the people that are buying the magazines because they want to be able to stay in shape by doing it in a fun way. So reading magazines is fun for them. These women usually subscribe to SHAPE magazine.

So first off I changed my background of the blog. I feel as though the background should match the vibe of the magazine. I chose the assorted fruits background because it gives off a happy vibe which is what my magazine is going to do. It also makes you want to eat more fruit, eat healthier, and workout more which is also the main goal of the magazine.

Our first step that we took towards creating the front cover was choosing a font we thought would work best for the magazine. We tried out a couple different fonts with our magazine title to see which one fit best. These are the few fonts we tried out. In the end we chose to do the third one. It is called victory fonts. We chose this one because when we looked up fitness magazine we learned that the titles are always bold and are all capital letters. These are some examples of genre conventions. Some other genre conventions we learned about for fitness magazines was that the title is always in a color that stands out to the viewers eyes. Most of the time they are red or yellow (two very bright colors).  We talked about doing a red title because it fits in with the genre conventions. It clearly took a couple tries to figure out the best font that we should use for the front cover.

 

Today I decided to make a layout of the two- page story.  I want to keep it simple but visually appealing at the same time. One way I chose to make it appealing was by putting multiple picture because everyone loves pictures. Another way was by making the title really big and putting it right at the top keeping it simple. i chose to do 10 ways to stay in shape because my front cover picture is a girl about to go workout and this story is going to be about her.

                                                                                                                                                        

These are possible images I will be using for my cover photo.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Today was the day that I looked more in to detail for the layout and media conventions. I learned that fitness magazine titles are only one word so i designed a layout for my cover.

Across the topd of the cover is the mast head Maximize. Going across the who,e page is a picture of the model from the main story. Next to the the picture id all of the cover lines. And of course on the bottom right is the barcode. 

https://www.slideshare.net/liam-lim-horgan/codes-and-conventions-of-a-magazine-front-cover-11085506

This is one of the articles I read to learn more about magazines and how they are set up.

Ready, set, lets go

So the first thing we did to start the journey on this project was started brainstorming possible genres for the magazine. We were undecided between a couple of them. But our final decision we came up with was to do a fitness magazine. Then the next step was brainstorming a bunch of potential titles for the magazine. These are some titles we came up with. We looked up to make sure they weren't already magazines but some were. We also searched up genre conventions so that our magazine goes along with other fitness magazines. WE found out that all fitness magazines have a one word title. Here are some we got inspiration from.