The Brief- To create two front covers and a contents page for each with a working website for viewers to interact with.
OCR Definition- Lifestyle magazines focus on interests and ways of living and cover areas such as fashion, health and wellbeing, food and drink, homes, travel, trends and popular culture. Lifestyle magazines typically have a fairly broad focus with a range of content, for example GQ covers fashion, culture, and politics. Because of this I would encourage students to make sure their magazines reflect that broader range of content and don’t become overly specialised with a narrow focus. Whilst students’ productions should be suitable for Hearst, they can explore lifestyle magazines produced by other publishers, so could also look at other titles such as GQ, Vanity Fair, Prima, and Tatler.
The categories under lifestyle seem never-ending. A particularly interesting avenue is decor and art culture. The challenge with creating an architecture and home design based magazine is the need for a remarkable location. Creating a lifestyle magazine on this topic is all about the fine details and lighting. It is necessary to place each decoration in the perfect spot to achieve the ideal image. However, an issue with this theme is the target demographic the brief requires (16-25 year-olds) and the average audience for a decor magazine are opposite.
There is also the celebrity lifestyle to consider, most popular with women that details the hot gossip and ins and outs of life in the spotlight. There tend to be a lot of ads, plugs and entertainment mentions from the week's upcoming TV shows. These magazines are made for an easy and often scandalous read and the pages tend to be covered in shades of pink, yellow and red. This magazine style is very maximalist and for me, it seems overloaded with unimportant news stories. I am looking to develop a magazine with more informative and meaningful content.
Features of a lifestyle magazine
Full-length features with illustrative images over the pages of Lifestyle Magazines. There are an abundance of sub-categories within lifestyle but they all tend to lean towards being colourful, attractive and informative. I believe it will be a challenge to create lengthy features that fit the brief and also match the imagery but my goal is to have them complement each other well.
My Initial Ideas
Considering the extensive variation of options, at this point in my research I am leaning towards creating a health magazine that covers sports, diet and exercise. This way I can create a mix of superficial, perfected images of food and posed sportspeople and candid images of sports being performed. My own experience of sports photography covers Cricket and a small amount of martial arts works which are male dominated so I will create a magazine targeted towards 16-25 year old men, ensuring I keep their interests at the core of the content in my magazine. However, I am keen to further develop my research.