Hello! I’m back. I started researching the travel genre and I’m getting pretty excited…. Here’s what I found:
1. Genre: Travel Magazines
2. Genre conventions-content
a. Lead/Hook: Traps the reader in and introduces the topic. The article generally starts with an interesting personal anecdote of the place traveled to.
b. What: Description of the story, quotes from people, opinions of the writer, anecdotes, and facts of the travel location.
c. Where: The location, establishes the geography of where the story takes place.
d. When: The season, time, and climate of the place traveled to.
e. Why: The reasons for the trip, motivations/goals/motives of the writer.
f. Who: Introduce the writer to identify with the reader, establish the people involved in the story.
g. How: How the location is reached, how the story unfolds.
h. End: Wraps up the story, relates to the lead, is a time of reflection and/or opinions and recommendations.
i. Some examples of articles include travel tips, destination information, interviews, and hotel “hot deals.”
j. The tone is “business casual;” the writer is trying to convey accurate information while also allowing the reader to enjoy reading the magazine and feel comfortable while doing so. At the same time, the writer should use everyday language so that he/she is more relatable to the reader.
k. The writers mostly use the second-person point of view when addressing the readers, and the first-person point of view to describe their personal experiences and opinions.
l. Pictures are vital: they should be beautiful and appealing in order to truly capture and convey to the reader why they should visit the location.
3. Genre conventions-production techniques
a. Certain content can be illustrated in a certain format. For example, data can be shown in an infographic or table.
b. Text needs to be visually appealing (i.e not long) so that the reader is not discouraged from reading a boring article.
c. Magazine producers generally start with design mock-up to have an idea of what the magazine spread/layout will look like.
d. Pictures are vital, as they show the audience what location the article is about and further persuade the reader to travel to that location. The shots and framing of the photographs should be helpful in conveying the message. Most photographs are long shots or extreme long shots to capture as much information about the location as possible.
e. Pictures should have captions in order to give more information on what is happening in the image and to motivate the consumer to dig into the article.
f. The body text (font, color, size, etc.) should be comfortable to read.
g. Producers have recently started to publish their magazines on mobile devices in order to reach more people.
h. Use of bold colors such as red or white on the cover to attract attention.
i. Blues are used heavily on the covers.
4. Institutional conventions-how is genre marketed.
a. The marketed audience is usually in the middle to upper socioeconomic classes, because they can afford to travel.
b. Cover has a visually appealing photograph and encouraging text to prompt the reader to travel to this location.
c. Sometimes includes phone numbers and prices of hotels or activities such as whale watching or ziplining in order to make traveling to the location easier for readers, as they already have the activities they will do on the trip, and therefore further convince them to make the location their next destination.
5. Magazine sample #1-include analysis of how this magazine embodies your
genre.
On the right is the magazine National Geographic Traveler with a beautiful cover of a tropical location, which is sure to convince the audience that this location is worth visiting. In addition, “10 Places to See Now While You Can” is demanding and exciting, and is displayed in a big, dominant font in order to give the audience a sense of urgency and motivation to travel to the location. The layout is simple and clean, focusing more on the image than on the text.
6. Magazine sample #2– include analysis of how this magazine embodies your genre.
On the right is The Sunday Times Travel Magazine. The cover is of a small island in the Mediterranean, with a neverending blue ocean surrounding it. This inducing extreme long-shot image alone is capable of convincing the reader to visit this location. As is typical of the genre, “Mediterranean Islands” and the rest of the texts have a large red font, to stand out against its nearly complementary color, blue.
7. List of 5-7 other film/magazine examples within the genre.
SOMETHING TO NOTE: I noticed that when I searched up travel magazines on Google, the most predominant color was blue! (As can be seen below) Do magazines with blue colors in their covers sell more, and do magazine producers purposely place pictures with dominant blues on their covers to sell more? I might be getting ahead of myself, but is this because consumers are more attracted to the pictures on the cover (of the idea of being in that beautiful blue ocean) or are consumers just more attracted to the color blue, based on color psychology? I will continue to research this phenomenon…but if my group and I decide on doing a magazine, we will most probably use a lot of blue shades.
Aha! See? On the infographic on the right, it states, “the color blue is the favorite one among humans worldwide.” So magazine producers are using lots of blue shades to make consumers attracted to their magazine and therefore purchase it… I feel an idea forming now...