Locations For Photo Shoot

St John's College

As I said before College was shut on Friday, while we were in town handing out our advertising leaflets we decided to have a look for some locations for the photo shoots. Our first thoughts were the colleges/universities, the grounds are beautiful and would be the perfect locations. Our first stop was St Johns College, you usually have to pay a fee to go on the college's grounds and have a tour but because we were inquiring about permission to use the grounds for a photo shoot we were allowed in without paying the fee. We spoke to a women called Angela McKenzie who is the Domestic Bursar's Secretary and Telephone Liaison Officer at St John's College, Angela said that its highly unlikely that we would get permission as the subject of the magazine didn't have a connection to the college. Angela told us she would ask for us and get back in contact, true to her word we got an email a few days later, unfortunately we didn't get permission to use the college's grounds like Angela said. Just before we left Angela told us there's a nice bit of land which didn't belong to the college and that a lot of people use that spot for photos. 

 

Outside the college grounds.

Random

While we were trying to find a way out of all the college grounds we come across a slopped surface where you take the punts down into the water. It's a quite place that really captures the beauty of Cambridge. If we were to use this as a location we wouldn't need permission, but it would need a little tidy up.

The Fitz William Museum

The next location we thought of was The Fitz William Museum. Leanne and I had been to the museum before on a trip in our first year of college. We went into the reception and spoke to a woman, she said that it's likely that we will be able too, she phoned someone to check and after 5-10 minutes we were told we had permission, we were only aloud to use the outside grounds, with that we had a look around the ground and picked a few spots we thought would look effective. 

 

Mill Pond

The last location we looked at was mill pond, we wouldn't have to ask for permission to use this area. Mill Pond is beautiful in summer, it's a large bit of land and there are many places within the area which I think would make the photo's look amazing. We only had a little look at Mill Pond and didn't walk all the way round, I'm sure we will to find the perfect locations.

Advertising

After sending out many emails to potential advertisers we thought we needed to go for a more direct approach. We created a leaflet which included the brief for our magazine and our contact details, as college was closed on Friday we decided that we would meet up in town and hand the leaflets out to potential advertisers. We targeted the independent stores as were not looking for big chain stores. We handed a few out to a few of the market stalls and to independent clothing shops. We think they seemed interested we will just have to wait and see.

Budget sorted

We have found our last slots for our advertisement space! and now the total of money is £550, we are in profit with the money being owed however still need £120 to pay the publisher and then £50 left over from another page. The extra money we thought about actually putting towards buying a stall in cambridge market square. I (leanne) was talking to amber who told her how cheap it actually is. This be great for us! We will be contacting them in the week.

Mood boards

Now we have roughly picked what sort of content we want in our magazine we have decided to create a few mood boards to help us visualise the sort of images and fonts we might want to use. 

We had about 5-6 magazines and each of us went through and cut out all the bits we liked. After cutting all the magazines up we had a massive pile of clippings, we then went onto separating the pile into two piles: Fonts/Colours/Patterns and Images/Content ideas. 

Contents & Flatplan

We have started to think about the content for our magazine, so far we have come up with this:

     Contents page- We will have one page for the content

  Features - We are planning to have 4 pages on features 

    How to do [make up, hair, nails] - We want 2 pages on How to do

    Tips on looking your best - We would like to have 2 pages for Tips on looking your best

    Photo shoots - The photo shoots are a main subject so we have decided on 6 pages for the photo shoots

    Beach/summer look - We would like to use 4 pages for the beach look

  Bridal - 2 pages for Bridal

    Jewellery - 2 pages for the jewellery 

   Adverts - Advertisements take up a lot of the magazine so we are having 8 pages for advertisements. 

After deciding what content we are going to use, we decided to create a flat plan so we could figure out  the magazine layout, it took a bit of time as we were constantly changing our minds on what pages should be next to each other or where the advertisements should go. This is only a draft so we can change it if we feel the need to. 

Advertising

We have started thinking about the advertising as that is how we are going to raise the money to actually print the magazine. We have decided that our magazine is going to contain 32 pages, we have decided that we are going to have 8 pages just for advertisements. We have researched into how much people pay for an advert in a magazine, in the Style magazine which is published in Cambridge for a full page advert it will cost you £500 plus VAT. Obviously we can't charge anything near that price, we have thought about charging £60 for a full page advert, £30 for a half page advert and £20 for a quarter page advert. 

We have done the maths and think we will be able to make £520. The £520 will be put towards the printing price which is expensive. 

Features

This week I have started to think about what features we could include in our local area magazine I thought about Summer fashion and how I could show this. Other magazine pick up on fashion trends and show off different styles to suit you. I could do something like this but I want to show off the clothes in a stylish way and doing this will be about the desgin of the magazine and how creative the magazine looks. To think  of ideas I created a moodboard and looked through a summer catalogue to see what trend and colours are in season, I also thought about what desgins I could use for the feature.The picture above shows the ideas I have come up with so far. I also contacted some local boutiques about advertising in the magazine and also if they would like to have a feature in the magazine. Some people got back to me and were insterested in adversting so I have now sent out a price list to them.We are hoping the advertisements will pay for the publishing of the magazine and we will be able to get a small amount printed so we can show or even sell our magazine to readers. I also heard back from the shop Jemporium Vintage which is a small boutique in Cambridge who sell vintage clothes they have offered to let me use some of their clothes for a shoot and do a feature on Jemporium. I am now hopefully going to meet up with them and see what clothes I can use and how I can make a feature out of their clothes. Once I have seen the clothes I can use I will need to come up with a theme to fit with the outfits I can then think about the content I can write about and how I want to present it.

Research into magazines

Today we have started looking at what magazines would be our competition and what sort of features they have what we could do and adapt. Style magazine is our main competition however as it's main content is designer we wouldn't have a problem with our magazine being too similar. Another magazine I found in our area was Velvet which is a local fashion magazine however it doesn't just cover fashion it also had a large cooking section. They also make one issue specific to something the issue I looked at was their wedding issue. This is something that we aren't going to do, we intend for it to be mainly advertising local shops and their clothes. We have also looked at how many adverts they have in each magazine.

•  Company magazine has 166 pages and has 56 different adverts, it is also £1 
• Velvet magazine has 163 pages and 136 different adverts and it is a free magazine
• Marie Claire Magazine has 323 pages and 149 adverts and it is £3.60 

From this we have learnt we need to contact a lot more advertisers and get around 50 people to advertise. We have also thought about getting other advertisers other than fashion and jewellery adverts. We also need to think of a price list for adverts and how much people would pay for an advert in a magazine. 

Once we thought about adverts we started to think about features and content we could use. We wanted to show reel a number of different fashion trends but not using high street fashion just local shops. Also in Velvet magazine they have a small section on mens fashion and we like some of their features and are thinking of using some of their ideas and adapting them.

Researching Paper

We have been thinking about the type and weight of the paper we need to use for our magazine, I (Amber) went down to the reprographics room in the college to research the weights of different paper. The first sheet of paper I looked at was normal office paper which is weighed at 80 GSM (GSM = Grammes per Square Meter), The second sheet of paper I looked at was card, card is weighed at 160 GSM, and the final piece of paper was card as well but instead of weighing 160 GSM this bit weighs 300 GSM. 

I took a sample of each piece of paper and showed it to the rest of the group, we decided that the normal office paper was too thin to use, and that the card was to thick, we thought of using the 160 GSM for the front and back covers. We were told that the 300 GSM card would be too thick for the front and back covers as it wouldn't be able to fold. 

We were thinking about using paper which had been coated, either gloss or silk, We contacted a printer and asked how much it would be for silk paper, She then emailed us back saying she would send us dummy books for an example, she sent us two examples; 80 GSM, silk and saddle stitched, the other was 90 GSM recycled silk and saddled stitched. 

We think that the recycled silk paper would suit our magazine, the quality of the paper is better and it has a shine to it. The only problem we have is that the recycled paper is more expensive that the just silk paper. 

Publishers

Today we have started to think about where we can publish our magazine. One website I looked at was CPL publishing in Cambridge. This worked really well for us because we could get an easy quote from them, we could put in what size we wanted and how we want it printed. However the smallest print run they would do is 2,000 copies, we looked to see how much they would do this for and the cheapest we could find was £1,800. This was for A5 and us doing our own distribution to shops. Although this is really cheap for the number of copies its a large amount for us to print and we would have to get a lot of advertisers to cover the costs. We also asked for quotes from Precision Colour Printing Ltd and they came back with the smallest print run they could do was 15,000. This is also out of our range for printing. We are going to have to find companies that work with a small amount of print. We could look at other local publications with a small distribution such as village magazines to see who they are printed by.

Company Logo

Now we have come up with our company name (Pearl Blossom) we needed to create our company logo. For this we all came up with our own ideas and created a mind map of our thoughts as we all had different ideas on how we wanted it to look.Our first designs were all  very simple and making them straight forward. This was so we could just mess around with font ideas and colours. However from doing this we all thought the soft light pinks worked really well and carried on using them later for our desgins.We all came up with different ideas Leanne's main idea was taking the pearl and making something from this and making it the main feature. Amber took the main idea of the blossom and used light pinks as the main colour. I mainly thought about the fashion idea and came up with a manakin with a simple pattern behind it as well as it having pearls around its neck. 
Once we had come up with a few ideas each we then created these on photoshop and illustrator. We then decided which one we liked best and we changed our thoughts to just having text as our logo instead of an image or a design. We chose this because when the logo is small you need to be able to see it and we thought text works in all sizes. These are some of the ideas we had.....