Magazine Research

City of Weston with a twist

Weston, Florida has numerous magazines that they put out during the year to inform those that live in the city on what is going on. I want to take some ideas from these magazines in creating my own. It could be like "Weston Magazine: An Inside Look At Cypress Bay." 

So what if I took a cover like this and transformed it into all about Cypress Bay? The cover could be a photo of the football field or the Cypress administration or athletic department or even a mix of everything. I haven't figured out the details yet but this is where my head's at so far. 

Something like this cover could be cool. I like how it shows four different pictures of kids playing sports as it shows off a wide variety of athletics in Weston. 

To make the magazine slightly more general, I think I should make it about Cypress overall and not just its sports. So for the table of contents, I would obviously feature my stories about athletics but also show off the other sides to the school. There could be a page for Student Government Association (SGA), DECA, class leadership positions, etc. This way it truly is a guide to Cypress Bay as a whole. 

The Our City magazine features different south Florida cities and has an issue for each one. I don't have a physical copy of the Weston issue so I decided to resort to their website for inspiration. Here is the link to the January 2024 issue: Our City Weston

Magazine Content

I like how the table of contents is easy to follow in this issue with the different colors and indents. Some table of contents can be boring with one color for all the text and can be difficult to navigate. I also like how its not one continuous vertical line of text because of the length of the magazine, but also the image at the bottom makes it more interesting. For my magazine, I will definitely take this into account.

There was not a lot of sports content in this magazine, but I did find this page and I like how they had many pictures, but the way they are aligned is not something that I want to do for my spread.

While this is a two page spread, the way these phots are aligned is much better than the previous page. This is not a sports story either but I do like the way they have the title and the images directly below it on the left page and the circle in the middle of the story with the text-wrap feature used. By the way, this page is from the December 2023 Issue but I just wanted to show the differences between these pages and how I will use them in my product.