Questionnaire Results

The dealine for responding to my questionnaire was today, I sent out 170 questionnaires to the whole of year 11 at my school. However, I was very disappointed to only receive 13 back and find out that all the questions hadn't been answered on some of the questionnaires. As a result of this my results aren't particularly valid but, I will work with what I have.

Question	Responses
Would the students be interested in a school magazine?	Yes - 9 No - 4
3 things the students would like to see in the magazine…	Amount of work expected form you – 6 Dress code – 2 Time managemnt – 2 How subjects differ from GCSE – 6 Benefits – 3 Work experience opportunities – 2 General advice – 4 Fun stuff (latest scandals) – 3 Reviews from students - 1
Would the students like to see a list of term dates in the magazine?	Yes – 13 No – 0
3 things the students considered to be interesting about fsg that may appeal to a new student…	Variety in subjects – 5 Friendliness of school – 1 Variety in teachers – 8 Extracirricular activities – 5 Canteen – 2 Rewards – 2 Chnages to the school – 1 Facilities within the school – 1
What style do the students want the magazine to be academic, informal or, a bit of both?	Academic – 0 Informal – 4 Both – 9
3 aspects that draw the students into other magazines…	Images – 10 Bold masthead – 7 Interesting plugs – 8 Price – 1 style of front cover – 1 amount of text - 1
Would the students prefer to see more text or images?	Text – 0 Images – 3 Equal amounts – 10
How often do the students want to receive a magazine?	Weekly – 4 Every two weeks – 2 Monthly – 7
Are the students willing to pay?	Yes – 4 No – 9
If so, how much would they be willing to pay? (The only students who said they would be willing to pay for it said that only if a percentage of the money went to charity)	50p – 3 £1 – 1 £1.50 – 0 £2 - 0

The results I managed to get are ok to work with as it is a preliminary exercise but, they wouldn't be sufficient if this was for my music magazine.

I have taken into consideration that sending emails to the audience I am targeting isn't going to get the number of responses i need so, I will need to think of a better method than emailing my questionnaires. Also, I need to stress the importance of the questionnaire and that it must be as accurate as possible, as I believe that some of the students didn't bother to answer some of the question as they didn't think it was important.

Textual Analysis

I have been looking at past magazines of other students and some American magazines to see what I think makes a good front cover and what makes a not so good front cover. I have been doing this so I can learn what not to do on my front cover and to get some ideas of how to put a front cover of a magazine together.
What I think makes a good front cover:

• Large, clear image.
• Big and bright masthead.
• Title that represents the magazine's genre.
• Catchy headings.
• Bright colours, but need to compliment each other.
• Variety.
• Clearly presented headings (can be clearly understood and can be seen on the page).
• Must fill the whole page.
• Relevant mise-en-scene.

What I think makes a bad front cover:

• A lot of the image being covered by text.
• Masthead being too small or style of font not being relevant to the magazine.
• Boring headings, need to grab your audiences attention and make them want to read the article straight away.
• Garish colours that don't compliment each other, the colours used on a front page need to compliment whist providing a contrast but they can sometimes contrast too much.
• Too much or the same sort of thing i.e. similar articles in the magazine, images that concentrate on the same thing or, the same colours all over the page.
• a cluttered page; the front page needs to fill the whole page so it doesn't have any white spaces however, you don't want to overload the page with too many different things otherwise it will overwhelm the reader.

First stages of research

For the preliminary exercise I am designing the front cover of a magazine for my school. It is going to be for year 11 students, existing or new to the school, who are going into sixth form next year and want to know some information about it, it will then carry on into the rest of the year to give them information about the school. I have created a questionnaire and sent it out to all year 11 students to gain some research so I can start designing my magazine to their wants and needs. I am giving them two weeks to reply as I know some people dont check their emails regularly, I did think about it before emailing them but, I thought that printing off hard copies and handing it out to them would result in me not getting all of them back as I wouldn't be able to track them all down. Hopefully I will get some results back sooner than the deadline of the 28th September so I cant start thinking of some ideas and drawing out some plans.