Transcript:
Teacher: Good morning students, as you all know today is presentation day. When I call your name be prepared to elaborate on the conventions and representations of social groups and issues in your magazine. First up is Emily!
Me: Through researching magazine conventions I was able to learn the fundamental features and components of a magazine, however as time passed and I got deeper into my magazine genre I learned in-depth about the key, common conventions of a Black hair, beauty, and skin magazine. Therefore once I learned the rules about my genre I was able to creatively push the boundaries of its conventions.
In particular, the masthead of black hair, beauty, and skin magazines are commonly large, bolded, and written in standard font with neutral colors, such as black, white, or in the case of Jet magazine red. However, I thought it was a bit plain, so I added some variety to my masthead by writing the longer part of my title, Beauty, in the standard, bolded white font and the shorter beginning part of my title Lux in calligraphy with bright neon colors. This added a bit more life into my cover page and made the words stand out more. In addition, the cover lines in black beauty, hair, and skin magazines usually are located on the left hand side of the page, framing the main image and they are written in a mixture of bolded, standard, and thin fonts. I employed this convention in my own cover page, as well as the barcode placement, issue date, and taglines.
On my content pages I organized my page number, title, and description in the conventional columns, but I placed their locations on opposing sides of the page to separate the hair, skin, and beauty sections. I added the website, issue date, and page number at the bottom right hand corner of the page like content pages usually do, as well pictures of corresponding skincare products. However, I moved away from the typical plain white background that is usually seen in black hair, beauty, and skin magazines into a more vibrant blue color. I felt that this brightened the page and fitted well with my color scheme and the colors and words on the page. For my double page spread I gave myself more creative freedom as there was less conventions to follow. I framed my text into columns around my image on the left hand side of the page and continued these columns on the right hand side of the page to make the text appealing to readers and easier to read. I also added a short puff piece on the bottom of the page to give more insight into the abilities of my feature model and to promote her business.
My target market for my magazine was black teenage females interested in hair, beauty, and skin so I created my magazine layout, content, images, sentence structures, etc. around stuff that would best appeal to this audience. The survey I conducted at the beginning of my magazine research showed that this target market is responsive to images of models that represent their skin tones, hair textures, and age group and content that is youth, hair, and skin friendly, therefore I structured my feature story and chose my models based of of these preferences. The cover page, content page , and double page models were all African American women in the same age group as my target market, and my feature story was an inspiring and insightful piece on my models journey to a successful hairstylist, which is a coming of age story I and my audience could relate to.
