The overall style of my magazine is summarised below.
GENRE
My magazine is a specialized DIY publication providing expert advice and tips and tricks for home & garden remodelling, repairs and maintenance solutions.
MASTHEAD
The process of creating the masthead is detailed in one of my previous posts which can be read here.
The matshead is made of 2 elements: the word “FACTOTUM”, synonym of handyman, with latin origin to make it more globally understandable PLUS a sort of subhead “Home & Garden” to define the perimeter of the magazine content.
FONTS & COLORS
It’s a technical magazine, hence the style should be simple, clean, easy to read, with a small but contrasting color palette used. Please refer to my previous post for more details here.
VISUAL APPROACH
For a technical magazine like mine, the visual approach should be informative and self explanatory. For this aim I intend to balance text and visuals, incorporating real life images from my own construction work. Images should reflect both:
- step by step technics, as in tutorials and
- before & after snapshots.
While fonts and color palette are very limited as explained above, in order to highlight key points I will make use of callouts and sidebars.
PHOTOS STYLE
My photos should not have artistic flair, but be more like documentary style. I will focus on the following characteristics:
- high definition and high contrast and even back & white images to draw the attention on the technical details of the project show in the article;
- close-up shots of materials with blurred background to showcase specific details;
- I will try to have the background as uncluttered as possible (this will be a difficult task as my pictures will be taken during my working hours as a constructor apprentice);
- I will also like to have as much as possible the handyman appearing in my shots, in order to give a more informal and engaging feeling.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I chose to have a simple 1 page ToC, with clear sections, each one containing fixed categories mentioned in the titles, while the subheadings would provide a very descriptive overview of the content of the article prepared for the specific category/ title. More details are available in my previous article here.
TARGET AUDIENCE
In order to understand my audience, I built a questionnaire and summarised it’s results into the following snapshot:
More details about the profiling of my audience can be found here.
