Producing my School Magazine: Prelim Task

From analysing our own school newspaper previously, I aim to correct the limitations I found throughout it as there was no set, clear target audience and so made the font style, colour scheme and imagery chosen very confusing to decipher the real demographic. When producing my own newsletter I will need to take a variety of components into consideration to successfully cater for my target audience.

The first main, important aspect I need to decide on before diving in to make my newsletter, is who I want my target  audience to be, and from this I will be able to work on choosing what images, content, fonts and colour scheme and how formal I want it to be. I have chosen to aim my newsletter at parents as I think this is the best option in terms of success of the newsletter, as I know from my own experience that parents are more likely to actually read the content of the magazine as the students would most probably already know and are aware of what is happening around them in their school at the present time and near future, especially through assembly's for example.

Due to my chosen mature audience, the content, unlike the Deyes newsletter, needs to be relevant and appeal to the parents through using professional fonts with a good balance of text and images that show off the school to it's best ability. The fonts used should be formal, but readable such as not using Comic Sans as it is too unprofessional but also not using a font that is too formal and not appealing to read such as Times Roman. This will allow me to promote the schools professionalism effectively. Also this would coincide with the choice of an appropriate colour scheme. I noticed from the Deyes newsletter that the colour scheme matched that of the school badge, which was a really relevant and good use of the colour scheme, however the actual colours were very vibrant and abstract primary tones which have connotations of a younger audience. Taking this into consideration I will try to also keep the colour scheme relevant and match that of the logo but keep the colours toned down to keep a more mature feel.

Also I love professional photographs and as this will not only cater to my target audience but also make the overall newsletter look  more professional itself, I will use images that I will take myself from around the school during production and try to capture the best aspects/areas of our school as best as I can to hopefully make the newsletter more successful with my target audience. These will be used in place of the clip art style imagery from the Deyes newsletter, however hopefully more like the quality of those used in the dance article towards the end. The photographs I will take will be necessary and of things such as the outside of the school itself (as the school has ivy growing all over it's surface and so gives connotations of an established, experienced school), and students taking part in various activities around school.