1YA Magazine

Our task was to produce a magazine in groups and we were given a week to make it. The members of our group were Romilly, Fran, Caitlin, Jonnie, Kairo, Shafik and myself. These were our individual roles:

Editors: Romilly and I
Front cover: Romilly and Fran
Contents page: Fran
Advertisements: Fran
Film article: Caitlin
Sports article: Jonnie
Fashion article: Kairo
Technology/games article: Shafik
Health article: Myself

Before we designed our magazine, we looked through a variety of magazines such as Woman's Health to gain information on different layouts, article types and front covers. By doing this, we also felt more prepared and inspired.

The front cover was designed on Photoshop and I believe it was very successful due to the bright colours and unique style used which makes it eye-catching and visual. We decided to name the magazine '1YA' because that is part of the Coulsdon College postcode so it makes it more personal to us and it links in with our target audience which are people aged 16-19 and this is the age range of students studying at the College. All of the articles were made on  Microsoft Word and I feel that they were all very well written and we have covered a wide range of topics with our choice of articles.

My particular tasks were to write two articles based on the theme of health and to help with the editing of the magazine. I chose to write about sexual health for the first article and nutritious recipes for the second article because these are topics that interest our target audience and are what many 16-19 year old's look for in a health article. For the sexual health article, I used the NHS website as my source to insure that my facts were correct and to gain the numbers for different helplines that I could use. For the food article I mainly wrote the recipes from personal experience however I used some recipe books for information about ingredient amounts. I chose to use recipes that were very simple as well as healthy because it is aimed at students who are unlikely to have the time to make complex meals. Overall, I am very pleased with my health articles because they are informative, easy to read and relevant to our target audience. My role when it came to editing was to read over everyone's articles to make sure there were no spelling errors or general mistakes and also to insure they looked similar and did not have a completely different layout to one another.
                                                                                                   

Here, you can see that I have used colours that have connotations of 'sexual health' such as pink and red and I think this is important because it gives the audience a clearer idea on what the article is going to be about just by looking at the colours.

I have separated my article into columns to make it simple to read and each section is on a different topic. For example, the health and advice section is separate from the alcohol and sex section. By doing this, the reader can easily find what they are looking for within the article.

  

I believe that the header for this article is simple but effective because there is not too much writing and the image of the fruit adds vibrancy and lets the audience know that the topic is going to be food.

                                                                                                                     


I decided to do a recipe for breakfast, lunch and dinner because it provides more of a variety for the audience and it is quite unique because I had not seen this idea being used in any of the magazines I looked at. I insured that I included vegetarian options and also a picture of each meal so the reader gets a deeper insight into the recipe.                




The magazine evaluation:

What went well?
Each article fitted in well with one another and after editing them together, the layouts were similar which helped to create a theme within our magazine. Also, each article had images, making them appealing to look at and colourful which links in with our bright front page. The overall feel to our magazine was very professional and looking at other magazines before designing ours definitely helped us to achieve that. Everyone in my group worked well together as a team, meaning that everyone knew what tasks they had to do, resulting in us completing the magazine to a high quality.

What would I improve if we were to do it again?
If we were given longer than a week to make our magazine, I feel it could have been much better as there would be a greater amount of content and advertisements which in turn would make the magazine look more 'complete'. We would also have enough time to add more articles such as ones based on music or gossip which would make '1YA' appeal to a larger number of people within our target audience.