Magazine: Draft 4

Cover

Since last time, this cover has undergone significant changes. I'll start from the most obvious.

1. The colour scheme.
I've opted to dial down on all the colours that were cluttering the visual balance of the magazine. I've opted to go for a red, black and white theme, which speaks sophistication, but also grabs attention. The sophistication is important given the name of the magazine, and the fact that I include that this is issue 720- this would make Madeleine Magazine about 50 years old. It's a magazine with a reputation and class. The particular shade of bright red is a rather appealing, modern shade. It was inspired by Apple's shade of red on their recent iPhones, which targets the same audience I am making this for. The only text I stray from this scheme is on the "Our New IGTV" title, in which I use the Instagram gradient colour fill. This gradient should be particularly familiar to any millennial- and the subject of Instagram TV is aimed sharply at the 18-25 audience. Instagram TV is being pushed as a brand new media streaming platform on Instagram, so by including this title, I am positioning the magazine as very connected to the younger audience. The image I want for the magazine is a well established, serious magazine that is essentially down with the kids.

2. Fonts.
It was clear to me that something just didn't seem right when looking at the previous version of the cover. After looking closer at the covers of many popular magazines, I realised that the fonts were incredibly important to the feel of the magazine. They all used text that were all in the same family of fonts. I was still surprised to see the massive difference it made to the overall cohesion of the cover when I made all the fonts part of the Helvetica family. I chose Helvetica because it's a premium font that's not too modern but not too classic either. I felt these qualities would be what my millennial audience would be attracted by. It's a familiar font too; Apple used it widely prior to 2016.

3. Image Size and Format.
I realised that I was working with the wrong aspect ratio to what magazines typically use. They follow a 8.3" by 10.8" (roughly) size, so I reformatted everything to fit into this. Actually made a lot of sense, as it gave me a larger canvas space to work on. It was much easier to align and place the text on this size, which was a problem I was having with my previous covers.

4. Clutter.
While I'm not a fan of the cluttered look on magazines, Marie-Claire does it. So I made the text titles slightly oversized, and added more titles. I also made the blurb sentences bold to seem more imposing and filling.

5. Article Types
A feature I noticed in several different covers of Marie-Claire was the use of small subheadings that classified what type of article the title was referring to. I incorporated this into my cover, seeing as it reflected a similar feature you see online. Millennial audiences would appreciate this time saving, anti-clickbait feature. The "Online" type is also there for the millennial appeal.

6. Organisation of Titles
A major problem of my previous cover was that there was no hierarchy of articles. It wasn't obvious which were the main points of the cover, and the bottom heading was at odds with the magazine mast-head. So I completely reorganised everything. Now, if you look at the magazine from a distance, the major points of interest are the mast head and the title "Rebecca Adis". From there, the IGTV article and "On-Screen Fashion" title follow as they are highlighted by text colour. Then the other titles come in. This just feels much more professional, and I know this is a technique real magazines use. It's evident, for example, on the Jodie Whittaker Marie-Claire cover. I think it's down to very simply, the rule of thirds being useful.

7. Drawing attention to Paramnesia
Given that the magazine is supposed to be cross-promotion for the TV series, in the previous covers hardly any attention was being brought to the show itself. This was easily rectified by making the word "Paramnesia" All-Caps, larger in font size, and highlighted in red. I still kept the actress the main focus of the magazine though- it would be odd to make it all about Paramnesia. Marie-Claire did a similar thing with their Jodie Whittaker cover as well: Doctor Who was not the primary text (but neither was Jodie actually, but I don't think that would've been consistent with this magazine's image).

Those are the main improvements I've made to meet the audience criteria and to show the influence from the original magazine. There are few other things I want to note:

• I've priced this at £3.70. I do feel that this is a bit cheaper than this magazine would realistically sell for- but I'm also aware magazine prices seem to fluctuate a fair amount. Marie-Claire seems to go for between £3.70 to £4.20. Anyhow, I do think it is justified to sell for this price as the lowest end of the Millennial audience are not those with a lot of money, who are evidently some of the magazine's primary customers, and this is also a monthly edition magazine, whose prices are usually cheaper anyway.
• On the title "#BelieveWomen" I used some funky modern formatting to draw attention to the hashtag. I think the #MeToo campaign and its effects are still relevant to most women who are interested in social media and TV, atleast more than articles that speculate on infidelity and the like as published on Marie-Claire. It also curates the younger audience more, as fresh Twitter hashtags (this one is from September 2018)  are more likely to be known to younger social media users.
• I've only used Serifs in the title "Rebecca Adis". I thought this created a nice contrast with the rest of the magazine, where it's all sans-serif fonts.
• This is hardly noticeable but I overexposed the cover image a slight bit as a lot of the real covers seemed to do it. It adds a shine to the overall look and is more eye catching, I felt.

Double Page Spread

Here's the final draft of the Magazine double page spread.

I chose to go with a very modern, sophisticated approach, incorporating perhaps the most high-end aspects of the magazine's image.

This text is run-on, and will go onto fill perhaps another double page spread, as typical for front cover stories in life-style magazines. I've pointed this out with the small marker at the bottom of the text block.

As promised, the layout is image heavy. There's a fine balance between the ratio of text and image. I chose to only include one image from on-set photography; the magazine would probably prefer to use their own images more.