Planning - Two Page Spread/Feature Article

 Hello Beautiful People! Since I've already planned the layout for my table of contents, I figured I might as well plan the layout of my two page spread. After looking over my researched articles, I've decided that I'm going to have two (maybe three) photos on my spread, which will hopefully take up just the right amount of space, and still leave room for the words and headings. 

Layout

The layout that I've decided on is for the right page to have the title in a large font at the top and a large photo taking up the rest of the page (maybe something at the bottom) and the left page to have the whole article, obviously arranged in columns, and another small photo at the bottom (probably left corner unless it takes up the entire bottom of the page).  I noticed in a lot of the articles I researched that they use color bocks, especially at the bottom of the page, so I might include that. I'm also going to have my quotes in a different color/block so that they stand out. These are close to what I'm going for;

 

Article

The article from my table of contents that I've decided to write is Mental Toughness: Competing Without Fear. I think this is a good topic that will apply to all ages and all types of athletes, not just teen gymnasts. I'm going to collect quotes from different people about their experiences with mental blocks, and ways to get over them. The article is going to include why athletes struggle with mental blocks and how to deal with it in a safe, healthy way without loosing your love for the sport. I'm super exited to write this article!

Planning- Cover

 Hello Beautiful People! The last thing I have to plan before I start production is my magazine cover. Since all cover pages have pretty much the same conventions that I already discussed in my previous research posts, these will be specific elements that I've decided to include in mine. 

Title

I've already decided that the name of my magazine will be "Elite", but I've also decided that it will be a teen sports magazine, and this specific one will be the gymnastics edition. Because of this, I'm going to have the word "Elite" in large, bold font at the top, and the words "Gymnastics Edition" in a smaller font underneath. I also like the modern look of hollow letters, especially for secondary headings, so I'm going to have the gymnastics part in outline letters. It will be something like this, but probably all white font and the bottom words will be smaller than the top ones; 

Photo

I've mentioned in the past that I love that I love how blurred backgrounds look on covers, so my cover photo is going to be  a gymnast doing some kind of pose with a blurred background. I also want to try to have her head layered on top of the title, like I've seen in other magazines, but I'm not sure If I'll be able to figure it out. This is what I mean by blurring and layering; 

Cover lines/ Puffs

The main, big cover line is obviously going to be my feature article, and I'm just going to pick out a couple more headings from my table of contents.  

Planning- Table of Contents

 Hello Beautiful People! It's time to start planning my table of contents, and making a mockup so that it will be easier when I make the actual thing. 

Article Headings

Even though I'm only writing one actual article, my table of contents has to be full, so, based on the magazines I've researched in the past, I've come up with some that I can use; 

• Rising Stars: Young Athletes to Watch This Season
• Coach's Corner: Training the Next Generation
• Mental Toughness: Competing Without Fear
• Flexibility Myths: What Actually Improves Your Splits
• How Judges Score Your Routine
• Pre-Meet Nerves: How to Stay Calm
• Team Spirit: Why Support Matters
• Gym Bag Essentials Every Athlete Needs
• Music Choices That Elevate Floor Routines

I don't know if I need anymore, but I think those will be good for now. 

Layout

Like I said in my Table of Contents research post, I really like the look of spreads with a very large heading and the articles kind of small. I am also probably going to have a few photos in my table of contents, so I have have to account for that. The photos will have to somehow correspond with the articles. So, the layout is going to be something like this, but maybe with the words arranged a little differently since I don't have that many article headings;

Planning- Name

 Hello Beautiful People! The next step in creating my magazine is choosing a name! I want the name of my magazine to be either gymnastics themed or sports themed, and only be one word. After searching for random words that would fit, I've found a lot that I think would be good, and I tried to single out words that seem like a magazine name:

• Elevate
• Soar
• Balance
• Pivot
• Ascend
• Elite
• Core
• Sync
• Blaze

After looking through this list a few times, I've decided to go with Elite because I feel like it's the most sports-oriented name on the list. 

Planning- Style Guide

 Hello Beautiful People! It's time to start planning out my magazine, and organize all my ideas, and the first step is to create a style guide! The first thing I did was ask myself some questions about how I want my magazine to present. 

Leading Questions

• Target Audience
• My target audience is teen and tween girls that do gymnastics and other sports. 
• Unique Value Proposition
• My magazine is going to be unique because of its niche focus and audience. It will be different from other sports magazines because of the different focus and target audience, and it will be different from other teen magazines because of the focus on sports. 
• Brand Personality & Voice
• I want my magazine to have a very bubbly personality, similar to old teen magazines. 
• Mission & Purpose
• I think the purpose is going to be about equality and representation in women's and youth sports. 
• Visual Identity
• I want to use bright, happy colors and bold fonts, but I still want it to look mature and put together. 

Style Guide

For my actual style guide, I thought about how I want my magazine (especially the cover) to attract my target audience. These are the elements that I'm most likely going to use; 

Fonts: 

Paragraphs: Times New Roman, small font size (just like this!)

Headings: 

For the main words, I want to use a modern, simple, bold font. And for the secondary words, I want to use the same type of simple font, but thinner and not bold. 

Colors:

I had mentioned before that I wanted to use bright colors, like pink, and I like the look of dark grey pages, so here are the colors I ended up choosing;

Project Proposal

 Hello Beautiful People! So I've talked a lot about my plans for my magazine throughout my research posts, but I haven't properly introduced myself or my project. My name is Jana Bassiouny, and for my AICE Media Studies brief, I will be doing a Magazine. I will be working alone for this project. 

I chose to create a sports magazine because sports have always been a huge part of my life, and compared to popular genres like fashion and lifestyle, I feel like sports magazines have always been unpopular or outdated. I noticed in my research that a lot of the popular sports magazines have the same old-fashioned colors and fonts, and I wanted to create a more modern-looking one. 

I'm writing my article on gymnastics because I have two younger sisters who are gymnasts, and I'm probably going to end up taking photos of them because it's easier. Because of this, my target audience is going to be teen/tween girls that do gymnastics or other sports. I want it to be kind of inspiring and address the social issues of women's and youth representation in sports. Like I said in one of my past research posts, I really like the layout and aesthetic of Inside Gymnastics, and I want to make something similar, but more focused around girl's gymnastics/sports, and younger athletes. 

To create my magazine, I will be using Adobe Illustrator since I've already had practice with it for one of my previous magazine projects. I might also use Canva to plan, but I can't use it for the actual magazine. I'm probably going to make a plan/mockup for all my pages so I know how my layout will be. 

Research - Cover Lines

 Hello Beautiful People! Like I said in my previous research post, my cover lines and puffs are going to be important in helping me appeal to my audience. I did some research on the titles of the words of sports magazines, and the fonts of different teen magazines. 

I'm going to need a few fake article titles for the cover and table of contents. Since they're obviously going to be about sports, I looked at some from different sports magazines. The ones from Inside Gymnastics all have the article title in a large font, followed by an engaging description. The article titles all have attention-grabbing words like Soars! and Mighty, that exaggerate the title and make the audience want to read it. Also, since the articles are mainly about certain athletes, most of the time, the athlete's names are part of the title, which should make creating the titles pretty easy. 

 

  The other sports magazines that I looked at also had pretty much the same format but not all of them included the people's names in the title, which was fine because the athlete was always on the cover photo, so it's pretty obvious who the article is about. Another thing that various magazines do that Inside Gymnastics doesn't is under the cover line, in a smaller, less significant font, they include the author of the article and/or the page it is found on, which I think is something I'm going to do. 

    

 

Overall, I think the format I'm going to use is large, captivating heading with a description, and small page number and author underneath. The main cover line is going to be about the person on the cover photo. 

Research - Target Audience/Distribution Practices

 Hello Beautiful People! Now that I know that my target audience for my magazine will be teens/tweens that do gymnastics or other sports, I did some research on some other magazines that target the same audience, and what conventions they used to appeal to that audience. Here's what I found: 

The first magazine I looked at was Seventeen, which is marketed towards teenagers. Compared to other lifestyle magazines, they definitely use a lot more color, and they take full advantage of their cover subject and cover lines to get people's attention. Like many modern-day magazines, their distribution has transitioned from monthly prints to a digital-first focus, and they now only print special edition magazines. They also rely heavily on social media like instagram and YouTube to appeal to teenagers.  

 

The next magazine I researched was Teen Vogue, which is a little more modern than Seventeen. They use the same muted aesthetic as Vogue, but always include bright colors on their covers and throughout the magazine. They also rely on very large cover lines to get the attention of their audience.  They use the same distribution practices as Vogue, which focuses on social media and their online platforms. 

Since I'm not going to have any social media or website for my magazine, I'm going to have to rely on bright, popping colors, and engaging cover lines. 

Research - Cover Design

 Hello Beautiful People! I've been doing a lot of research on the content and layout of my magazine, but I haven't really looked into the aesthetic that I want, so today, I decided to do some research on the covers of various sports and gymnastics magazines to see what colors and layout I want to use for mine. 

My main inspiration has been Inside Gymnastics, and, like many sports magazines, the colors of the cover depends on the photo, and so the colors usually match what the main subject is wearing. One thing I noticed about their covers is they usually one have feature article mentioned on the cover, and the background is always dark or blurred, so the main focus is the person in the photo and the white masthead (also, they don't change the masthead color like other magazines). 

The Inside Gymnastics articles all have pretty much the same design; black background with white text, and the headings are either teal or light purple to match their aesthetic. Although I really like their article designs and I think they're really pretty, I don't know if I want my pages to have black backgrounds, so I looked at some other sports magazine articles. 

My cover is either going to have one or two people on it, not a whole team, and I really like how the blurred background looks, so I looked at other sports magazine covers that fit that criteria. Also, although I love Inside Gymnastics' simple look, I don't know if Cambridge is going to let me get away with only one coverline and no other words on the front, so I lade sure to look into magazines with a lot of words on the cover. These are some covers that I found that have everything I'm looking for: 

Research - Article Topics

 Hello Beautiful People! I've decided that my two-page article is going to be about gymnastics! I'm still not sure if the whole magazine will be gymnastics or general sports. Either way, I have to figure out what the topic of the article will be, so, I've done some research on gymnastics magazine articles to see what I can write about. 

The December 2025 edition of Inside Gymnastics had multiple two-page spread articles about different topics. The first one I read was about one specific athlete, Joscelyn Roberson, and her training and skills this past season. It included a lot of quotes from interviews with both her and her coach. It didn't mention anything about her team or anyone else since it was entirely centered around her. 

Another article I found in that same magazine was about the Team USA mens's team, specifically their performance in the 2024 Olympics. Since the team was made up of 5 people, they wrote about all 5 athlete's performances and contributions to the team at the Olympics. This one only had one quote from one of the athletes and didn't mention any of the coaches. 

The next article is from the December 2023 edition of Inside Gymnastics. This one is about Simone Biles and her performance at the 2023 World Championships. This article listed Biles' achievements and performance at the competition, then went on to describe the second place winners, and briefly listed their scores and achievements. It also included a short quote from Biles that was separate from the main article. 

Overall, I noticed the most common practice is to have the article be about one athlete, and their performance/experiences at a specific competition, so I think that's what I'm going to do. 

Research - Masthead

 Hello Beautiful People! One of the main components of my magazine, and the one I'm most exited to make is the front cover. I already talked a little bit about it in my previous research posts, but I did some more in-depth research of the mastheads of some sports magazines, and heres what i noticed; 

One of the most iconic part of all magazines is the masthead because even though the color changes the actual words are always the same. Since I'm only making one magazine, I don't really have to worry about placing it on different covers. I also noticed that the color of the font correlates with the colors of the cover, so mine is just going to match with the colors of my photo or background. 

The most important part of the masthead is the font. One thing I noticed is some of the more famous magazines like Sports Illustrated and Sporting News is that the font of the masthead is kind of old fashioned, which makes sense because they started a long time ago, and they never changed the font. But some of the newer ones, like ESPN, and Inside Soccer have more modern fonts (although the ESPN one is just the logo). So, for mine, I'm probably going to use a simple, modern font. 

Another thing I noticed with almost all of them is that the cover photo os the athlete layers on top of the words, which I think is really cool, and I will definitely be using in my cover. But sometimes, the photo covers up the majority of the words, and you can't really see it, but you can still tell what the magazine is because of brand identity. This means I have to be careful not to cover up all the letters, and make sure it's still very obvious what the masthead says, since nobody knows what my magazine is, and I can't really rely on branding. 

 Those are just some key things I noticed, and will be using in my cover, I still have to decide on a name for my magazine, but that depends on what sport I decide to use. 

Research - Feature Article

 Hello Beautiful People! One of the requirements of my magazine is a double page feature article spread. Since I've decided on a Sports magazine, my feature article will be something about sports news, or I could highlight a specific sport depending on what photos I take. Either way, this is what I've found so far about feature articles; 

Basic article conventions:

• Headline
• Large and bold to catch attention

• Standfirst/deck
  
• Short intro paragraph that summarizes the article and hooks the reader
• Drop Cap
• The first letter of the article is often stylized
  
  
• Columns
• Text is formatted in 3-4 narrow columns for readability
• Byline
• Authors name and title
• Images and captions
• Relevant images are central on the page 
• supporting captions are usually underneath in small but readable font
• Pull Quotes
• Important quotes are highlighted in a larger font to break up text and attract attention

• 
  
  
  
  

That's just some of the basic stuff, but as soon as I figure out what my article is going to be about, I'll start planning out the layout of my article, depending on how many photos I use. 

Sports Magazine! (Example Analysis)

 Hello beautiful people! It's official, I've decided to do a sports magazine and I'm super duper exited! Now I'm going to look at a bunch of sports magazines, especially their cover pages, colors, fonts, and overall aesthetic for inspiration. Here's what I found:

The first magazine I researched was Sports Illustrated, which was first published in 1954. They typically use a photo of a well-known athlete in a dominant pose on the cover, which draws in readers. Their covers often include the colors white, blue, and sometimes red and orange. They use a lot of action photos that capture emotional moments, or show success or intensity. 

The next magazine is ESPN, which was first published in 1998, and stoped printing in 2019, after transitioning to fully digital media. Their masthead is the ESPN logo, similar to Sports Illustrated, they use famous athletes on their covers, however, I noticed they use a lot of headshots instead of action shots. Their covers and articles use modern, bold fonts and bright colors. 

 

 

Next is Sporting news, which started printing in 1886, and stopped printing in 2012. Because of this, their  magazines have a vintage aesthetic and use muted colors, mainly red and orange, and old fonts. Most of their late covers included one large action shot of an athlete, however some of the older ones used a group photo, or multiple small photos the corresponded with the articles inside. 

 

 

Those 3 examples are magazines that cover multiple sports, but another option I have is sport-specific magazines like Slam, Golf Digest, Baseball America, and Runner's World. These all appeal to fans of specific sports. This could be a good option for me so that I don't have to take photos and write about multiple sports. 

 

 

 

In my next posts, I will research more specific elements of these magazines, specifically the elements that I will need for my project!