UNIT 3 : create a media product: LO1 : Sample materials

Connotations from the mood board

- Colours

Overall colour wise I really like the majority of mastheads i have seen that the majority of the mastheads are using gender neutral colours e.g red, white, black, this being a key factor that i would like to incorporate into my mast head due to my magazine targeting both genders.

My favourite colour from the whole mood-board is the baby yellow of VIBE, the colour yellow is a very unusual masthead colour as its normally seen as too light and not eye-catching enough unlike e.g red however in this occasion the yellow makes the dark cover of the magazine really contrast, I think this cover has shown me that masthead has to correlate with the front cover.

- Fonts

The majority of the fonts on my mood-board are in san serif, this being expected due to the gender neutral connotations and the easier visibility of writing form a distance however I did find that a lot of other magazines on my mood board, mostly food magazines, had serif font this font having connotations of professional and sophisticated. Serif font conventionally is used to target female audiences however on 'Forbes' masthead, a magazine notoriously for male audiences it has very strong serif font this I believe due to its academic connotations to the font and the magazine targeting very well educated audience e.g university professors, bankers.

Overall I think i will create my masthead with san serif font to make the magazine appear very modern and gender neutral and i'm not targeting specifically at a higher social grade unlike Forbes.

- House Style

Most of the magazines have a very strong contrast between the masthead and front cover, i like this idea as its sophisticated however catches the audiences eye, taking inspiration from my mood board i will aim to have cool tones in the main portion of my front cover with a warm or bold title cover this overall will create a professional but eye-catching for the audience this is perfect due to my audience being 25-40 age wise this means that bright colours which would be used for younger children and teenagers would perhaps look childish and give an immature impression for the magazine

Positive aspects of this particular mastheads being the colour, I especially wanted to experiment with mastheads being shades of green, this being down to Sheffield being known to be one of the greenest city's in Sheffield and it having the biggest tree to person ration in Europe this statistic should be celebrated and seen as my magazine is representing Sheffield I wanted to look into my masthead and house style connoting aspects of Sheffield's personality. Along with the shade I chose to use a blocky san serif font this to connote modernity and not specifically target a specific gender, seen as I am targeting my audience on location rather than gender or age its important to not exclude any readers by visual styles.

I wanted to experiment with having the “the” in various places as I wanted to add elements of direction and demonstrate different aspects that my readers would have this demonstrating the diversity of the area my magazine will focus on, this will be a running theme throughout the magazine. I chose to just have this font in a orange colour, this to demonstrate the currentness and popularity of the business that I will be featuring, I wanted it to denote a hot temperature this backing the idea of the successfulness of the businesses.

I like this font the best so far, this being due to the relatability between the meaning of the masthead and the visual aspects, I like how the small dotted line would denote a bee trail this having many positive connotations for the audience to receive visually for example bees as animals are notoriously very hard working and have a huge sense of community this I wanted to represent as I think it relates very well to my readers and the sense of community in the area I'm focusing on could be described with the metaphor of a beehive.

Carrying on with the beehive visual style I further added a dark lilac colour to the font, I wanted to add a different colour to make the font be more eye-catching to the audience and connote a happier atmosphere for the magazine as I think the black masthead above creates quite a simplistic masthead that doesn’t carry many connotations.

I do like the colour applied as I think once again it doesn’t connote a gender but does have connotations of calmness and serenity however do think that the dotted bee line isn't as obvious or contrasting in lighter colours like this one therefore if I am to keep the dotted beeline I think black is the best colour to accompany it to ensure the best contrast.

Visualisation 1: Front cover