Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience? – Serena Bashal

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Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience? – Serena Bashal by Mind Map: Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience? – Serena Bashal

1. Mise-en-scene

2. ‘Very nice I like the colour scheme and it is obvious that the magazine is some type of rock music magazine, punk rock to be precise, but it pretty much looks like a proper music magazine.’ (Peer review on my blog) I tried to attract the audience by keeping my mise-en-scene as representative of the genre as possible, notably with the props and styling.

3. ‘A bit too gory, may worry parents.’ (Review from my mother) It is always important to get a parent’s perspective on a product aimed at a younger generation, and it is understandable that my mother says it may worry parents, however that is what the genre of metal does, therefore parents worrying is a good thing.

4. ‘The locations used in your contents fits really well with your genre and everything just pieces together.’ (Peer review) I wanted to use a variety of different locations to make my magazine look extra professional and to attract a wider audience. By using a live gig, it attracts audience members who like attending live music, and the graveyard connotes death and horror which would appeal to readers who like horror.

5. My main theme of colours was black, white and red which worked well in attracting my audience as those particular colours are a typical colour scheme of my genre as well as the individual connotations each colour has – black signifies death, fear and mystery, red represents boldness, blood and danger while white characterises a blank canvas ready to conjoin with the creativity of an editor’s mind. I chose to throw in a bit of neon green into my dps as just the black, white and red over a double page seemed to plain, there was nothing to grab the reader’s attention. I chose neon green as it complemented the other colours well as well as my model’s styling – it just pulled everything together.

6. ‘A bit too much red, it is too intense.’ (Review from my mother) From a middle-aged person’s perspective, large quantities of such a bold colour might well be too intense, however middle-aged is not my target audience, youth is, so the red being too intense for a parent is a good thing as rebellious youth tend to like what the middle-aged don’t.

7. Layout and Fonts

8. ‘I also think you should add some more cover lines apart from that I would say that your front page is looking really good.’ (Peer review on my blog) I chose to have fewer cover lines than the norm on my cover so as not to conceal too much of my hand-made, blood-spattered backdrop. With this feature as well as everything else on my page, adding to much text would make it look cluttered and overdone.

9. ‘For improvement you could add the website link at the bottom or top of your page and maybe change the vibrant green colour on the album part at the bottom right.’ (Peer review on my blog) I followed through with adding the website link to the bottom of my pages as this is a convention of any magazine, as well as the fact that it increases audience reach and awareness that they have free, international access to more content on the website. I chose to keep the green album box as it added vitality to the page and eliminated dullness for the reader.

10. ‘…I like the layout you’ve done on the DPS.’ (Peer review on my blog) My DPS has a slightly atypical layout – usually a dps wil dedicate the majority of one of the pages to photography. Due to the fact that I wanted my photos to have special effects and the three separate images, they fitted better on the page the way they have been placed. I could’ve stuck to the characteristic singular giant photo on one page, but I wanted to purposely challenge conventions and do something a little different.

11. ‘DPS has too many headings, I don’t know where to look first.’ (Review from my mother) In spite of this feedback I chose to keep all my headings as I was following conventions, plus all of them were needed to anchor the text for the reader – the skyline ‘Smash’ reminded the reader of the brand so that it sticks in their head, adding the artist’s name and the heading just below that gives the audience an insight of who/what they’re about to read about while the secondary headline gives a more in-depth insight of the article itself.

12. ‘Your model on the cover could be making eye contact with the camera as that is what most magazines do.’ (Peer review) I chose that particular shot as it was the best one from my shoot, despite the lack of conventional eye-contact. I think the mise-en-scene in the shot makes up for it as my model’s styling is the main thing to attract my audience.

13. ‘I LOVE the way you showed your Photoshop skills by editing the long shot and adding different layers because it links to Rock Sound magazine as they have done the same thing.’ (Peer review on my blog) It is true that I intended to attract my audience using funky editing, inspired by Rock Sound. The layers on each image make it seem distorted, and somewhat haunting which connotes my genre of metal, makes the magazine stand out while also adding an element of professionalism.

14. Model/Photography

15. Furthermore, I styled my models in a way to connote my genre to attract fans of that genre, aka my target audience. There are a few different sub-culture styles included, notably punk, cybergoth, goth, emo, glam metal etc. It is crucial to include models/artist that are representative of the target audience so that they have someone to relate to and who adheres to their personal taste.

16. ‘Very creative photography and I like the triple effect in the editing.’ (Review from my mother) After flicking through Rock Sound, I was inspired by the idea to do the layered ‘ghostly’ editing, and this must be able to attract the audience as a similar magazine had a similar editing style. My releasing a lot of creative energy with my dps, I was able to attract like-minded creative people – additionally my model was especially alternative looking, and hopefully aspirational to my TA.

17. Language

18. ‘It’s funny how you brought up kittens on the front cover in the same line as blood, sweat and tears.’ (Peer review) By juxtaposing the text, I was able to generate irony and humour for my audience and therefore attract them further. Kittens are small and cute whereas blood, sweat and tears suggest pain and brutality, so to put the two together creates an interesting effect.

19. Colour Scheme

20. ‘The colour scheme of the front page matches the contents page more than the dps so I think you should make some adjustments so that it looks like it could be one magazine.’

21. ‘Wow! Very nice, I like the detail put in to it and the colour scheme, it emphasises a variety of different things.’ ‘…also that you try to match the colour scheme as well.’ (Peer reviews on my blog)