AS Media Preliminary Task

For my Media AS Preliminary Task, I have been designing a cover and contents page for a Sussex Downs college magazine. My target audience will be males and females aged between 16 - 19 who are all students at Sussex Downs. I have made many different choices to the style and features in my magazine, that I think will appeal to my target audience.
I have chosen for my magazine to be called 'Student Life' as i feel it is an appropriate name for my target audience, as, they are students and it's all about their student life.

Before I started producing my student magazine, I made a flat plan, as you can see:

I have decided for the headline to be 'Yzzy talks business' as it

I decided to put the features of things such as freshers night pictures, details of a Paris trip and the chance to win tickets to the xmas college party on my front cover as they are all things that students would be interested in, as I have noticed when talking to my friends they are all really interested in college partys and college trips.

I have decided to use a Sans Serif typeface for my magazine as the magazine is aimed at students, in which would want an informal feel from a magazine, giving them a break from everday college life, also to be able to achieve this I have decided to use 'slang' on my cover for the tagline 'ur magazine, ur student life'.

As I want to create an informal magazine for students I have decided to make the page layout very informal and I feel i could achieve this by having the Main sells placed at an angle, which I think would give off a relaxed impression to my target audience of college students.

Here are the photos I took to be used as the main cover picture:

I have chosen to use the photograph on the left as I feel it attracks my target audience of students aged 16 - 19, as it gives that 'care free and cool' attitude that college students usually want to give off; so they can relate to that picture.
I wanted the picture to a medium close us (MCU - head and shoulder shot), so, in my magazine i had to crop the photo to be able to achieve this.

I also made a feature giving students information about a Paris trip, the pictures that go with this feature are pictures that I took on a recent Paris holiday which I went on:

This also applys for the freshers night feature:

Here is my final outcome for my Magazine 'Student Life':

Overall, I think that my magazine has been sucessful and that the target audience of students such as myself would be attracted to reading it as it has features such as freshers night pictures, winning free tickets to a party, information to for a Paris trip, football/netball reviews (to attact both male and female students) and a course review, all in which I believe students would be interested in reading about. To improve my magazine I think that I could incorporated more pictures on my contents page and maybe putting more detail into it as it would give the students more information on what they were reading about. I am pleased with the photos that I have taken for the front cover as the main one gives a care free attitude which most students like to be assosiated with: laid back.
When asking some members of my target audience (fellow students) how I could improve my magazine would be to change the colour scheme becasue it seems a bit dull.