Research

For my research I gathered many different types of front pages, ones that were both good and bad and I annotated many of them in all different ways allowing me to potentially see what things I would need to ensure that I do or don't do when designing my front page. 
Alternatively I also took different parts of a magazine and labelled them with the different things that would contribute to a good magazine. Things such as titles and straplines on the front pages. Moreover we looked at the different features that would help persuade the audience to actually buy and read the magazine such as the colour schemes and the pictures used amongst the captions.

Moreover we didn't just look at the non-published, made for school ones but the professionally made ones, also looking at their featured articles and connotating them and the devices and things they used to appeal to the customer/reader. We also looked at things we could take which we could use for our own coursework.

I think personally that getting the unprofessional looking school magazine covers and putting them against the ones that do look good was a good exercise because it allowed us to differentiate exactly what we would want to do and how we would go about ensuring that the outcome would be good. Furthermore looking at what we want out of the cover is a good part since I share many attributes with my target market of 11-18 year old students, male and female alike.

Examples include, 

As you can see we made sure to dissect them and break them down to see what was good and bad about each cover, which also helped up developed our understanding of what would make a good magazine cover and appeal to our target audience.