How did you attract/ address your audience?

Addressing the audience is really important. If your magazine is aimed at a younger audience then the way you talk to the audience needs to be friendly and chatty with silly articles and the photography must be friendly and not too controversial however, if the target audience is a serious middle class adult the images and mode of address must fit that for example, formal and complicated or specialist grammar, more text than images etc.

For my magazine, it was important that it included features and topics that would attract a punk and rock audience. Therefore, the themes must be related to their lifestyle.

Some psychologists suggest that an opinion is formed in a 10th of a second. Which means the look of the magazine is the first most important thing to attract an audience. In order to appeal to the target audience, the magazine had to be unique and unlike any other print on the shelves. To do this I took inspiration from David Carson's designs, using his unorthodox methods of editing and photography combined with a typical punk inspired font like this:  

 

Another thing that was important to consider with the image is if the image was too much like what was in the mainstream media it would not appeal to the target audience. Most pop and rap magazines that feature women have them over sexualised and near naked.

On the cover of this edition of Vibe magazine, it features Beyoncé in minimal, wet clothing. This is obviously fitting with the male gaze theory. It doesn't portray her as a serious musician but as an object for sexualisation. Even the headline fails to mention anything about her music  or serious issues but advertises seeing images of her and saying that she 'strips down' Would this be any different if a man was on the cover?

The answer to the question is yes. Here, on this edition of Vibe, Jay-Z is on the cover. He is almost completely covered and looking serious. The headline also mentions him being a successful solo artist and talks about him being an entrepreneur. Very different to how they portrayed Beyoncé

In order to fit with ideologies of the genre it was important to do the opposite of this with my own magazine. In rock magazines the way the artist looks isn't the most important aspect. So the model in the cover image was wearing a normal t-shirt, as well as this it was edited in a way where how the person looks isn't important and being a woman makes no difference in terms of photography.

Inside the magazine, the topics and themes are all directly relevant to the target audiences lives. The magazine features topics about mental health issues and feminism which are all important modern subjects to talk about and effect the readers lives. They're also controversial issues and being controversial is apart of the punk ideology. Furthermore, the way it is written is formal but still understandable for people who aren't as educated as others as the magazine aims to appeal to all people and is written to be more personal but not insult the audiences intelligence.