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

When designing the overall concept for my magazine, I planned to attract and address my audience in a range of different ways including colour, design and photography and content.

For the colour scheme, I firstly tried a simple black and white scheme but early feedback amongst the target audience indicated that black and white was too boring so I experimented with the colour scheme and decided on using bright primary and secondary colours which connoted energy and youth. I showed drafts to a sample of the target audience and they preferred this colour scheme to the others ones I had tried.

For the layout, I chose to use lots of graphic devices to make the pages look full and interesting, contemporary and graphic. My decisions were based on research amongst the target audience which included showing them copies of existing magazines and watching how they read them and listening to what they said about them, their likes and dislikes.

For the photography, I wanted to avoid images that looked to artificial and conventional of lifestyle magazines. I thought about the style of the band I wanted to feature and also the readers' tastes and came up with some informal but cool images of the band. I think that the dark background on the cover image and the subjective gaze of the band will help to attract the target audience.

Overall, the target audience for my magazine are people who base their life around their music, for example, wearing their favourite band t-shirts or hoodies and wearing shoes which are about 10 years old. They do not aspire to the latest fashions and like to think of themselves as 'Individuals' in terms of psychographic classifications. Understanding their tastes and attitudes help guide me in deciding how to design the magazine and what content to include. I know these people play different instruments so the promise of instruments as promises should be a seller. The offer of an exclusive view of all the concerts coming up should have also been a good selling point because these my target readers love to attend concerts.

Here is a Flickr annotation of my magazine and Kerrang!:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenlowe/4135765542/in/photostream/ - Kerrang!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenlowe/4331998595/in/photostream/ - My front cover.