Qualitative Audience Research

To find out what would be the best colour scheme and structure for my magazine front cover I conducted a focus group with members of my audience and I showed them various different templates of my magazine as possibilities for the final product. I asked them questions regarding the designs to get valuable qualitative information from them about the different templates.

Seen below are the templates that I created and showed to my focus group.

As you can see I tried to create various different colour schemes and structures within these templates.

The first question I asked of my focus group was "Which colour scheme do you prefer? and why?".

The overall agreement among the majority was that the first colour scheme red and black was the best of the 4. One of the participants remarked "I like the way the two colours contrast and also because it looks like the NME" this tells me that if I were too use this colour scheme then I would be sharing that of the NME and many other music magazines as red and black seems to be the most widely used among music magazines. So by using this template I would be following conventions.

The second question I asked of my focus group was "Which layout do you think is the best? why?"

There were a lot of different opinions on this question amongst my focus group as some preferred different aspects of all the designs while others like certain ones in particular. One of the participants said that "I like the way the figure complements the page on that template (the 4th one down) but I like the way that the text is placed  on this template (the 1st template shown above)." So I think I will have to take varying different aspects that were well liked by my focus group and combine them all together to make a design that my audience will really like.

The third question I asked of my focus group was pointing towards what I should include in my magazine so I asked them "What do you expect from a magazine?".

The responses consisted of the participants listing things that they would expect to see in a music magazine. These included "interesting articles, high quality images, free things, latest music news" among other things. So I will try and include everything that was mentioned by the focus group.

So after taking all of the feedback into account I think the final magazine product will look similar to the top template but will have elements of all 3 implemented into it.

Quantitative Audience Research

To discover more about my target audience I created an online survey through survey monkey and once I had gained enough results I created a slideshow via Microsoft PowerPoint containing many graphs clearly showing various things about my audience. The slideshow can be viewed at slideshare.net at the link below.

Click here to go to my slideshow.

Or view it here.

Audience survey presentation and profile page from jammingamer

The slideshow also contains an audience profile page which is something I created to show to potential advertisers so they can find out what would be efficient to advertise within my magazine.

By collecting this information I now know exactly who my audience are and what sort of things I should include in my magazine.

Preliminary Task: School Magazine

For the preliminary task we were instructed to create 2 pages of a school magazine. The 2 pages that I constructed were the front cover and the contents page, both of which can be viewed below. We were told to create these pages to get us used to the codes and conventions within magazine pages and to help prepare us in designing for specific audiences as a school magazine must cater for students, teachers and parents so by giving us this task we could learn from our mistakes in creating the final media product.

The Front Cover of my school magazine that I created for the preliminary task

The contents page of my school magazine that I created for the preliminary task

So as you can see the pages are not on the level of a professional magazine yet but I was only just getting to grips with creating magazine pages at this point. 

In evaluating these pages I would definitely discuss the fact that I do not believe I have catered to all the audiences in my design as it seems likely that only the students may read it as the design and the language used both would appeal more to students that teachers or parents as the images are all of the students and the things covered in the magazine seem like things only students would be interested in, for example the guide for exams would only be useful for students. So when creating my final product I should definitely always bare in mind the nature of my audience as this is important for magazines.

I will develop further evaluation of the preliminary task on completion of my final media product as this will allow me to see the areas in which I have improved with ease.

The Design Brief

AS Media Studies Coursework Design Brief

The project that we had to complete for AS Media Studies was to construct 4 pages of a music magazine. We were able to decide on the genre that the music magazine would cover and also the target audience that we would cater for.

This project involved many tasks to help us to decide on some of the design choices that we made and the things our audience was interested in. We researched into the representations and codes and conventions involved in magazine production and made decisions on whether we would follow these designs or subvert them.

We also created an online survey which we spread around online to gain valuable quantitative information about our target audience.

We analysed existing magazines that were similar to our own in genre and audience to check various techniques like the mode of address used and the structure used. We also conducted focus groups involving members of our audience in order to gain their input in the form of qualitative information about how we should structure our magazine and how it should look so we could create the ideal product for our chosen audience.

We also did lots of preparation in order to construct the magazine pages in the form of contact sheets, rough designs and flat plans.

After the preparation phase we then began construction on the final magazine pages and using all of the research and planning we had performed we were able to construct them with our audience and existing magazines in mind.

One of the stages of the construction involved having to take photographs to use for our own  pages and so this is where looking at existing examples and doing lots of planning helped us to create good images that would either follow conventions like the male gaze theory and hyper reality or to subvert conventions.

After the construction phase of the project we had to complete a large scale evaluation of the project as a whole in the form of seven questions. Each question focused on either different areas of production or different stages of production  and helped us to evaluate the project effectively.

All of the work that we have produced will be presented in the form of this online blog and through file sharing systems.