Market research on existing college magazines

East riding college magazine: Student life front cover

                                                                 

 

 Masthead/title: Big, bold, contrast white title with black background, stands out

Main image: As the magazine is called and about student life, the main image does not represent student life in any way. It is dull and bland, the people are facing away from the camera, so there is neither any action nor expression is shown. Also, there is no text to go with the image, so the reader has no clue what it represents. The main image does not relate to the magazine.

The ident/logo is shown clearly which indicates the origin of the magazine.

Images: the images are supposedly of relation to the subjects in the magazine, but there is no text near them to indicate which. They are not in the same alignment. The layout is inconsistent and scattered.

Colour/house style: The colour scheme on the front cover is consistent but still rather bland. I would think that bright colours would represent bright and exciting students, as this magazine is about student life. The font also un-necessarily different. The font for ‘Student Life’ is in Times new roman; a very old fashioned and plain font for portraying student life. The colour and house styles are inconsistent on the contents page. The contents are green and look completely out of place and font is not the same. There is no structure and it does not look professional. 

Articles: The front cover only shows an image that is hardly relevant to the product. There are no articles or even a main headline or story. The titles of pages on the contents section clear to see and in correct order. However most of the subjects are unclear and hard to know what they mean. For example, one of them is ‘do you dare face the guy?’ How is the reader supposed to know what that means?

Anchorage: There are no images or captions, or anything which reveals any subjects discussed in the magazine on the front cover. The images do not illustrate or represent the subjects in any way because there is no text to tell the reader what they represent.    

Price and barcode: Along the top right of the image, it says ‘free’ which indicates that this magazine is free.

Competitions/teasing concepts: The front cover only shows one image, and if there are any competitions in the contents, they are not made clear by the un-specific titles.  

Messages, morals, values: The title ‘student life’ indicates that the magazine touches upon everything that students go through and take part in college such as studying, enrichments, sports teams etc. but the random images, unclear main image and contents titles, I cannot tell.

Target audience: The target audience for this magazine would be teens and students in general, but the contents are unclear and there is no anchorage, so I cannot specify the audience.

Representation: Again, the lack of specifics and annotations of images make the representation unclear, apart from being about students.

The front cover gives no insight onto what the magazine will contain, and the contents page gives no detail. Therefor this magazine would be hard to read, and it would prove hard for readers to find what they might be looking for in the magazine.