Blossom was produced in order to show that maintaining your garden can be simple but also have a sense of beauty. The targeted demographic is mainly females aged 40-59years. It is also aimed at targeting teenagers and young children so as to spark an interest in gardening with the brightly coloured cover page. Typically, audiences are found buying a food or a fashion magazine as seen in the questionnaire. I designed my magazine in a unique way but not diverting, too much, from the codes and conventions of a typical magazine. I found that brightly coloured objects and an unusual cover attracts people to pick up and flip through a magazine.

After sufficient research and grasping the aim of how to create a magazine cover that would look like something professional and looking for unique ways to use all the gardening apparatuses at my disposal, I had to pick and choose what would be eye-catching and would be well loved. Selecting a gardening magazine was a choice based on the situation with the pandemic and being stuck indoors. It offers people of all ages, tips and tricks to transform their garden to a unique retreat but within the safety of their own homes. At the same time it aims to focus on repairing and strengthening our relationship with nature. My colour palette offered a wide range of greens, oranges and reds which I had to sync to the rest of my pages. I challenged the conventions, a bit, as the page is collage of the Emperor Shah Jehan, which was created by amalgamating different parts of various shots which was not done in the magazine covers I had seen. Of course, with a topic that is not as popular as food or fashion, I had to focus on the creativity side and come up with a really unique front cover to get the audience’s attention.

Picking colours, limited within the image, I used them in cover lines to add a pop and for visibility. I had to keep in mind the convention used and that the image was the main focus so that I did not crowd the page with cover lines and I had to go easy with the fonts and placement of each cover line.

My masthead is bold conforming with the conventions. Black and white cover lines blend in well with the image and the rest of the conventions i.e. barcode, date issue, strip line, button, etc made the cover page look more professional.

With the contents page I challenged the convention, as most have numerous pictures on one side and the contents on the other, whereas I put my pictures inside the word ‘CONTENTS’ and the page numbers and titles indicated with each letter.

My double spread was not conventional either, as it had pictures on the top half and text on the bottom.

Horticulture was the magazine I used as my inspiration and source for gathering information on the cover line placement and general layout. The Horticulture magazine was similar to what I had had in mind for my own magazine. The cover images in Horticulture were always vibrant and showy, some even depicting insects. Not to divert from my own strong cover image I had to stick to black and white font colours. Also I did not want to overcrowd the cover so that the reader would be overwhelmed.

The issues in this genre that I tried to highlight are climate change and limiting food wastage. I felt that the genre is not a popular one and wanted to shed some light on how people, from all the different social groups (regardless of age, sex, colour, backgrounds, etc) can connect and easily get back to nature, nurture wildlife and bring natural beauty to their homes, both outside and indoors. I created each page keeping the target audience and the conventions in mind to embody the actual spirit of my chosen genre that is Gardening.