Magazine & Poster Research

Colours:

In particular I found that colours used in posters/magazines indicate what gender they are aimed at. For instance pink is typically known as a very femanine colour and this will aim the piece of media towards a more female market - this would be true for males if the main colour were blue. Colour also indicated the theme of the media form. If the poster was about a horror film for example the colours were more often than not kept very dark and in contrast they were lighter if the film were a comedy for instance. The colours used also had particular meaning, if the magazine article were about love or marriage red was often a main colour theme throughout, which is a shade particularly associated with romance.

Text:

The font varied according to which gender the magazine/poster was aimed at. For males it tended to be very plain and standard where as for females it was often slightly more flowy and letters were more pronounced.The size of text was also important as it indicated certain words/phrases which were important. For example the title of a film, its date of release and the names  of world famous actors were often in bigger text on a poster in order to attract people's attention.

Language:

For magazines/posters aimed at a younger audience vocabularly, sentence structure and punctuation were kept minimal and very simple. For those who are middle class citizens the tone was more structured with complex sentences yet still without any hugely long complicated words, in order to cater to the everyday average person. For those of a higher status language was more formal with substantially longer characters.

Content:
The content for the posters was kept minimal, only the key information was included, this being because people only tend to glance at a poster and prefer not to have lots of text. For magazines however they contained more text content, although mainstream ones less so than higher status ones.

Images:
Posters were mostly filled up with images in order to attract the eye. If it was a poster advertising a film sometimes popular actors/actresses were used which would hopefully intregue the audience into coming and watching. Magazines contained images too, depending on what the topic was related to. Magazines considered to be for a higher educated audience tended to have less or smaller images than those for a mainstream audience which were bigger and often overlapped a double spread.

Positioning:

For posters the images tended to be in the middle of the paper as the focus. For magazines the images were small and put to one side for high status ones, whereas for a mainstream audience the pictures were situated in the middle and there was usually more than one and of a poorer quality.