AICE Media Studies

My groupmates and I are looking to keep some elements of our original magazine idea with some adjustments. We felt that the audience of simply teenage girls was too broad so we are narrowing our target audience to college girls living on a budget. Because of this change in audience, we are brainstorming different magazine name ideas. The former name of dragonfly may be too juvenile of a name to appeal to women in a different demographic and stage in life. We want to keep the meaning of our name as a symbol of change and transformation while maintaining a sense of maturity. When researching symbols of change, we found that we liked the names Ladybug or Crescent for our magazine. A ladybug symbolizes good fortune, while a crescent moon represents new beginnings and making dreams into a reality. We felt that the crescent moon's symbolism best reflected the time of change that young college girls are undergoing. However, we found that there is an existing magazine with the name of ...

Conventions Teen Vogue utilizes conventions similar to that of Seventeen Magazine and other teen magazines. The italicized teen distinguishes the magazine name from that of its Vogue  magazine counterpart, and the varying colors between the two words further emphasizes the differentiation. In the example covers provided above, the colors of the magazine name and the headlines and cover lines coordinate with the colors present on the celebrity's outfit. The gold font color matches that of the gold shimmering dress featured on Tavi while the blue font color of 'Vogue' coordinates with Demi Lovato's blue-tipped hair. The magazine name and all other cover text are brought in front of the celebrity's picture so as not to distract from the content being the central focus of the magazine. The magazine, much like other teen magazines, uses renowned celebrities on their covers to appeal to the target audience of teenage girls. The name of the celebrity is directly to t...

Conventions For over 70 years, the Seventeen Magazine has been publishing articles about fashion, beauty, romance and dating, and life. Their magazine covers are distinguished with the italicized magazine name in lowercase font. As society has become fascinated with reality television and celebrity gossip, the teen magazine has evolved to appeal to this by the featuring of celebrities on the cover. The names of the celebrities, like Maddie Ziegler and Selena Gomez in the examples above, are directly beside the faces to create anchorage. This allow the reader to associate the name to the face, otherwise the simple image of the celebrity carries no meaning. The celebrity, usually a female image of pop culture or a famous boy seen as attractive to young girls, makes eye contact with the reader as a mode of address, conveying a playful expression that makes young girls want to be like them or be with them. The utilization of 'your' in the strap lines is a form of mode of addre...

In class we were assigned a preliminary task of creating a magazine cover using the our knowledge of conventions. My group created a magazine centralized around giving advice and tips to teenage girls in our magazine dragonfly. Dragonflies represent a period of transformation and change, which is reflective of the changing teenagers undergo during puberty. We recognized that teen magazines generally had a celebrity on the cover so as to draw the audience's attention. We incorporated the celebrity, Billie Eilish, and her aesthetic of her green hair and the spiders to create a spooky Halloween edition. We selected purple as the primary color in the color scheme. Purple signifies royalty and we found that it paired well with the combination of black and green of the slime and headlines. We highlighted buzz words such as "hallelujah" and the celebrity "Lizzo" to establish a sense of importance of those words within their articles. In the sweet spot we placed an a...