Planning my college magazine

Before we began to design our own magazine cover's I analysed various examples of college magazines such as 'soup'. I looked at fonts and centre images for example, aswel as looking at there sell lines and colour schemes. I found this to be very helpful because I found that the magazine involving music caught more attention then covers based the acedemic side of college. Continuing this point, we then created our very own magazine questionare as a class in order to find out what students would prefer to read in a college magazine. As homework, we each asked five people to fill in questions such as 'How much would you be willing to pay for a college magazine?' and 'Which of the following contents would you most like to see in a college magazine' and gave options such as 'sport/music/gossip' etc. We found as a class that the majority of people chose 'music-local gig reviews'. This helped me when designing my magazine to include a music based content and this then influenced the title 'Feel Alive' because it suggested that students prefer to read a magazine that has energy.
When we analysed the 'soup' magazine cover we uploaded this onto our 'flickr' websites and analysed them through the 'add a note' tool. I noticed that the font connotated an arcade font which is very bold and striking. The fact that they had used an amp suggests the stereotype that all college students play loud music or love to disrupt. Another humourous dig that the magazine appears to make is that all students eat cheap food such as soup and dont know how to cook. This is shown through the opened tin of soup sitting on a heated stove ring. This helped me when it came to designing my own font and layout because I could see what worked well for the 'soup' cover and what didn't.
To plan my college magazine on a piece of A4 plain paper I started by drawing the centre/main image which covered the page acting as a background for everything else on the magazine to go over the top of it. I then thought about the main genre of my magazine which was music because it seemed very popular in our questionare, then thought of a three other topics which i wanted to include on the cover such as 'gossip' and 'college parties' etc. I then designed how large and roughly what font I wanted to use for the title 'Feel Alive'.