Summary of what i have learnt from my format research

From the interviews and research I have carried out towards finding out what people want from a magazine and the typical trends found in an indie music magazine, I found out a number of different elements which I thought were key in making my magazine and I am going to carry those things forward to create my own magazine. I found out that most people said they would want plenty of images in the magazine to make it interesting, so from this I am going to focus on my photo shoot to make sure I have a diverse range of photos to choose from that I can put in my magazine to make it interesting and relevant to my magazine genre. I also picked up on similarities in front page layouts, which typically consist of the mast head being located in the top left hand corner of the page. The main image is central with a large tagline and is normally surrounded by extra text and small puff images to make the magazine look busy, but not cluttered. The text on the front cover, gives enough information to entice the reader into wanting to read the magazine further but without giving away the article topic altogether, making it pointless to buy the magazine. Colour schemes are also normally consisting of about three colours or so, any more make it look unprofessional and messy. The colours normally consist of two very contrasting colours and one other colour similar to one of the colours already chosen for the colour scheme. When researching about contents pages, I found that it is very important to make sure everything is laid out clearly and simply so the reader can find what they are looking for with ease. The majority of magazines consist of about 50-70 pages, so I am going to take this to use for my own magazine to make it full of information and to a professional standard. I am going to use page numbers to make it clear what article is where in the magazine, and also use some images to highlight the main articles in the magazine. I will also use captions for each article in my magazine just to give an extra bit of curiosity to the reader. The main double page spread article for my magazine will consist mainly of photo as I found out that for an indie music magazine target audience, they would prefer to have a large photo with a short but informative article, as articles that are too long they find boring and will cause them to eventually lose interest in the magazine. I will include enough text for the article to be worthy of a double page spread, but have a good balance between the image and the article that goes with it.