Social Class Research

The social class I will be aiming the magazine at is E grade citizens(with my target audience being male students). I will cater towards their needs by using plugs that generic students are interested it, a cheap price, monthly instead of weekly iterations of my magazine, and features on money saving tips (good deals for headphones, speakers, or music). The magazine will also have advertisements aimed at students, such as cheap supermarkets (Iceland, heron, lidl, aldi etc.).

I believe a price of £2 is a reasonable price for students, and is not set too high that it will put students off of buying my magazine; the price is also set at a level that is still expected to deliver professional quality content. There will be subscription offers that have a better overall price that buying from the high street, as well as a 20% discount when bought with an NUS card.

The free gifts and plugs used would be “student survival packs” which include food supplies, some money (~£50) and alcoholic drinks. There would also be plugs including hi-fi systems, signed records/memorabilia from famous artists, as well as headphones as well.

Social class will help me choose which feature stories to use, instead of running feature stories on a £6000 pair of speakers, I will write feature stories about gigs, nightlife, and cheap deals on food/drink/tech that can be found. I believe these are things that students care about, as they would rather pay £2 to read about that than a product they will never be able to purchase. The social class will also help me in targeting the target audience, because the feature stories will be tailored toward students.

 

The image above shows a chart of social classes, the social class my magazine will be aiming for is class E or D citizens, or to be more precise, students. I will attract this demographic audience by using feature stories, double page spreads and plugs that are geared towards and will attract typical students, I will also set the price at an affordable and competitive level.

Focus Group

 

The Focus group was useful because it allowed me to gain an insight into what the requirements of a magazine are for a group of students, who are the demographic I will be aiming the magazine at. It has allowed me to make decisions such as pricing, social media, feature stories and use of plugs.

I found the responses to the questions asked where pretty normal, I expected the price to be lower, but apart from that, I agree with what was said by the focus group. My General findings for the focus group are that the price should stay low, around £2.50-£3, social media is a useful tool to get closer to the readership community, there should be the option for digital copies of the magazine, available online to download, as well as the use of plugs to help draw readers in.

I will change my layout of contents pages to allow for social media links to be included, apart from that; I will add more features on music festivals and live performances, I have found that the majority of the information I received from my focus group helped confirm my previous ideas on the magazines layout, content and style.

Name and colour scheme

I have decided to call my magazine Ebonics, this is in reference to both the term for slang used by many African Americans, and connotations within Hip Hop itself, it is also giving reference to the song "Ebonics" by influential east coast Hip Hop artist Big L.

The colour scheme I have decided on is a mix of Black, Red and White. I have chosen this colour scheme after researching magazines within the genre and analysing their colour schemes, and conforming to the genres conventions in terms of colour scheme. These images show the front covers I viewed to help me decide. They make use of similar colours, and I hope to achieve a similar look with my magazine. I think the use of bold colours on the masthead for VIBE is particularly good, as well as the general use of fonts on the front covers.

Mood Board

Mock up images

This is the original image I used for my magazine mock up, it features Roots Manuva and I used this image as it is suitable for a magazine front cover.

This is the finished image, I added text to the image, and removed the gray background from the image to keep with a set colour scheme, I used red text so that the text is easily readable and stands out to the reader.

This is an image of the original photo used, It features Method man and Red Man, and also displays a sterotype of Hip Hop fashion conventions.

this is the final image used, I used a red font to contrast from the black and white, and also because there was red writing on Method Mans T-Shirt, it also makes use of conventions such as a barcode, masthead and feature stories/images.



This is the original image I used for my Front cover with an MF DOOM main feature story, it makes a good use of colours and makes a good main image for a front cover.

This image shows the finished front cover image, I removed the gray colour from the background, and overlaid text over the main image, making use of the same colours, and a feature story and image on the top left hand side of the page, unlike some of the other front pages this doesn't have a barcode.