Blog 4: Magazine ideas (Planning)

My magazine title:

WeebEmojiTV. (A Japanimation website, where you can play games, discover new anime adventures by completing quests/tasks, read anime magazines for any news updates. You can also watch/listen to your favourite anime clips and anime tips you can follow by).

Target audience:

Ages 12+

Cover lines/Image types/font and colour scheme/Background image:

For my cover lines, I have included 'Time to travel behind the scenes', 'All the entertainment from this guy', 'Tutorials on how to become an anime master', 'Complete all tasks to win a free voucher and access all our best quality features', 'WeebToon' stuffed toys inside!', 'READ NOW'. I went creative with this one, because I want my magazine to look more original and more adventurous in the specialist community.

For the image types of the front cover, I have included the logo for my magazine, because I want it to look more understandable for the audience and to match the title.

Furthermore, for the font and colour scheme, I went from serif font, to sans serif font. I didn't really want to use the serif fonts, since it's more overrated on digital and print magazines. Plus, they have more style varieties of sans serifs than serifs.

For the colour scheme, I went with the anime culture, by adding pastel colours for the front cover, by using (Pastel blue and pastel yellow).

For the background of my magazine, I want the audience to understand what kind of magazine I'm doing, for them to take a hint about what they are about to read. So I'm going to be using a background that sets the anime culture, with it being based in a town with colours around it.

Blog 3: Circulation figures

Circulation figures in the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association

The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association reported on Tuesday that Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump dipped in circulation beneath two million. The average circulation number for March (2017) period was around 1,915,000.

The manga magazine's circulation suddenly fell by about 91,000 from the December (2016) period when it was about 2,005,833. It was the average circulation number for the July to September period, which was less than one third of the magazine's record circulation of 6.53 million in (1994).

The circulations of Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine and Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday magazines unfortunately did also fall from January-March (2017). Weekly Shonen Magazine's circulation decreased around 22,000 from the previous period to around 964,158. Weekly Shonen Sunday's circulation increased about 3,600 to around 319,667.

Moreover, The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association reported in (2015) that circulation in all three magazines had suddenly dropped by more than 10% in the previous year. Although JMPA reported that Weekly Shonen Jump rose slightly in circulation in (2009) and (2010), Japan's manga magazine circulation has been reported as falling since at least (2006). Weekly Shōnen Magazine's circulation dropped below two million in and below one million last year. JMPA previously noted that each company is putting effort into digital publication, which may account for part of the decrease in print circulation.

The chart below shows the circulation numbers for all three magazines beginning with the January-March (2014) period.

Blog 2: Codes and Conventions on a Magazine cover

Codes and conventions

For the front cover of the magazine, we can see that it has a mast head (Black Clover Spellbound By Shonen Anime!) that's been positioned in the middle of the front page, slighty being covered by the central image, written in a big, sans serif font that is in colour to show the audience what the magazine is leading the audience to and who it's made by. What I like about this is how they've set it out in a way the audience can see what they are reading, and what it's based on. It gives them more interest and more time to reflect on what type of magazine it is. It makes the audience feel aware that the massive title displaying in the middle, showing them that it's the main feature in a specialist world. Secondly, on the front cover you can see an image of the character's gaze, as we can see the sharpness in the character's eyes, due to the flame that's reflecting on them, which drags the attention to the audience to make them more focused on the character's actions. We can see that they have added a lot of mise on scene due to the use of vivid colour (make them stand out), costume and a lot of subtitles such as 'Cosplay! Toys! Games!' and 'Exclusive Jojo's Bizarre Adventure poster inside' which can bring excitement to the audience because maybe children would want to try it out for themselves, and are desperate to continue looking through the pages, and that there is a lot to discover. It can bring the addiction to anyone who admires specialist magazines and making them want it so much that the person feels ill without it. We can also see that it's mentioned '32-pages of free manga' to make the audience wanting to keep reading through if they are highly interested. Also, it increases the chances of an article to be read through and could rise up the amount of sales it gets. Furthermore, if you can see at the very bottom, it has a barcode, which shows that it's a print magazine. However, on digital magazines, there's a 0% chance that you don't get barcodes.

Pocket magazines

This is the inside of the magazine:

So as we take a look inside, we can see that it has some main features that we expect inside a magazine. We can see that it has a title 'Spellbound!' to give a bit of background on what the magazine article is really about to the audience and what they are going to be seeing along the way. Secondly, we have the blurb. It's in a sans serif font, white, which gives us the meaning about the article before the audience starts reading it. It gives them more background information about it so they have a better understanding. For the article underneath the blurb and title, at the beginning, it has a drop capital. There's a purpose for a drop capital in a magazine article. They are an effective way of grabbing readers attention because they add personality, style and visual strength to the page. We also have the page design of the article. We can see that they have included bright colours, effects such as explosive flames to make the audience feel action packed, as they are stepping into a world full of action and suspense when they ponder through.