AUDIENCE PROFILES
The following people are the type of people I imagine would read my magazine. I wanted a wide range of various people with different backgrounds and unique characteristics. There is one common factor, their interest in art. Art is a universal language that speaks through each of its many forms, from a canvas to buildings and sound. Anyone can enjoy art, no matter how complex or simple and small their love is for it, one may enjoy art without being conscious of it. Art is everywhere. Everything is art.
PROFILE 1: Monika Wagner
Age: 27
Job: Nurse
MBTI: ISFJ
Social Group: C1, responsible for patients.
Hobbies/ Interests
Monika nurses her sick patients diligently, she enjoys being surrounded with her many hard working colleagues, all trying to save as many people as they can. However, when the burden of not being able to heal unwell rests too heavy on her shoulders, she withdraws to art and the creative, alternative universe it provides, one where she plays no part in the death of some unfortunate patients. During some of her breaks, she can be seen in her favorite corner spot with her left arm dangling out the window sill as she draws in her small pocket journal, idly doodling the citizens of her fantasy world. Occasionally, she will indulge in the guilty pleasure of buying as many trinkets as possible in a department store, like keychains and small toys or sculptures. Simple and small things make her happy. Sometimes she gives her precious discoveries away to disabled, young or old patients as parting gifts.
Likes/ Dislikes
Monika loves organizing items, and displaying simple and minimalistic objects that make a cozy addition to her warm apartment. Her minor OCD contributes to her disdain for messy arrangements, she can’t stand a messy living room or work space and is often seen rearranging the rooms she enters, as such, she has unintentionally renovated the floor of the hospital she works in to some degree. She also likes to buy plants to freshen up her small space and takes part in fundraising campaigns for the poor or disabled. When cleaning up her house, refurbishing her living room or maintaining the healthiness of her roof garden she plays music. Her music taste mostly consists of soft jazz, jazz ballads or jazz classics and tends to skip the louder punk and rap.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7fEiwpooXwB?si=6192cf953cbe4ccc
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DXbITWG1ZJKYt?si=5daadde76b3c45d5
Home Life
Monika lives in a small apartment, at times she feeds the birds that fly down to her balcony. She likes to garden at the top of the building where her apartment is based, as such, bees are attracted to the plants and flowers she has grown and have made a small hive at the rails of the roof. In her house, she engages in simple day to day activities, fluttering around her house at the beat of her jazz when doing chores, using the broom as a mic, dusting her large book collection, burying her face is the smell of fresh laundry, changing her effervescence scents, taking long baths with scented candles, drawing on her little journal and continuing her daily diary entries.
Friends/Family/Relationships
She visits her family every weekend for lunch, she has a little brother, she regularly calls them. Although they are quite close and rely on each other from time to time, her job takes up most of her time. Other than this, her friends, also nurses, usually go out for lunches and dinners during their shifts, close friends have slowly become distant over time, but when they reach out for medical help she is always willing to extend her helping hand. Her closest friend and biggest inspiration was an aspiring doctor she spent her university days with, his face is littered all over her little journal, albeit surrounded by her hand-drawn, wilting chrysanthemum flowers.
Aspirations
Monika wishes to live life fully and hopes she can leave a mark on the world with her work, she tries to help as many patients as possible so they’re inspired to join her on this mission as well.
Media Consumption
Monika uses her iPhone as a main source of information and media, she uses it to watch cat videos to fuel her nostalgia, scrolls through her long winded photo gallery and pins her interests on pinterest to look for cottagecore style layouts for inspiration. She uses whatsapp and occasionally snapchat to organize social events with her friends and instagram for news, entertainment and DIY ideas. She uses her macbook, but prefers using regular pen and paper as a scrapbook enthusiast. Rather than using her macbook for research, she uses it to watch her favorite KDramas when snuggled in the comfort of 3 duvets and a weighted blanket, she loves romance and comedy and hates the idea of horror.
Sport
Monika does not typically play sport but is rather fit due to constantly moving around patients, doing personal errands and her healthy diet provided by the vegetables from her garden.
PROFILE 2: Luó Yan
Nationality: Chinese
Age: 19
Job: Aspiring graphic, web designer, UX/UI development, university student
MBTI: INTP
Social Group: C2
Hobbies
Yan is a lazy and very tired university student doing a degree in computer programming, she typically will not work on anything unless it interests her, hence her problems with meeting deadlines. She believes that life doesn’t have to have a purpose, nor a grand ambition, she thinks it’s okay to wander through life finding interesting things and phases until the day she dies. During her free time, when she’s not banging her head on her table after debugging software, she will be playing video games or working on her design skills in figma. She’s usually uninterested in anything else outside of the realm of her interests.
Likes/ Dislikes
Yan hates pressure. Therefore, Yan hates herself for applying it upon herself when she hasn’t done work. To her dismay, one of her other dislikes is unproductivity or the feeling of worthlessness, which she also lives by on a day to day basis. She’s developed a habit in which she overthinks her entire project in her head, before she decides to set her pen on paper, or place her hand on her mouse. This then leads to a spiral of burnout since she doesn’t feel the need to complete what she feels has already been completed in her mind. However, there’s one thing that manages to calm her down every time, her cat. Coddling her cat gives her the energy to move on from every problem.
Home life
Despite owning very little belongings, her room is a mess, clothes piled up in a clean corner, pencils and pens spread on her wide, adjustable desk. One matter of note is all those belongings seem to vaguely correlate to where they should be, a systemized arrangement in a chorus of chaos; the clothes, although in a wild pile, are still situated somewhere clean, the pens, although cluttered, still lay on the table. This is because she feels no need to fix it nor does she believe she has the time to get distracted by doing chores when she’s already busy procrastinating on an irrelevant and unrelated branch of part of her work that she’s currently interested in. However, in the midst of mayhem, is her expensive, well loved, custom-built PC, with two graphics cards, and a quad core CPU. Beneath her fingertips are her linear gateron yellow switches, in a custom keyboard which is foam, cotton and tape modded for her preferred “thock” sound, picked particularly for this occasion– playing an FPS game she refuses to leak the name of. Resting snuggly on her head are her wireless Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones that struggle against the force of her rapid glances at the different screens of her tri-monitor setup. In her carpal-tunnel-prone hand, she loosely grasps her honeycomb mouse which she had also modded in weight and… yeah, it’s an overall expensive setup, adorned with classic RGB lights. Hence, her lack of belongings and her stock of instant noodles, the only things she can afford after buying everything on her priority list. It doesn’t matter to her anyway as everything she needs to access is on her laptop, or so she says. Her house is bare of life outside of her degenerate room as she believes it would be a waste of money to buy other forms of furniture that she will probably never use. Although her lifestyle is unhealthy, it’s comfortable, she has her own home gym in her reach, and a desk that can transform into a standing desk to prevent any health problems associated with sitting all day, she also owns a very cozy hammock in her sunlit living room (the only room touched by the sunrays) as a change in environment when she’s tired of her dark room.
Friends/Family/Relationships
The room next door, is owned by her roommate and best friend, who shares similar views as her and tends to be more attuned to cleanliness. They like to bounce ideas off of each other as they take different courses within the same field, which helps in finding multiple opinions and views on the same thing. It also helps that they have opposite strengths and weaknesses, Yan wishes to become a back-end developer or software engineer, whereas her best friend wishes to be a front end UI/UX designer, which makes for an excellent team. Another prominent figure in her life are her cousins and family, she loves her family and is constantly on discord calls, sharing her entire screen of work so they can reprimand her to get back on topic, she’s extremely close to each member, especially her siblings. The final figure that plays a large role in her life is her beloved cat, Jerry, named after the mouse in Tom & Jerry, helps stabilize all her negative emotions and redirect her concentration. There isn’t anyone else in her life, and she intends to keep it that way, for her, although she enjoys having friends it can be exhausting to keep up with friendships and relationships as they constantly have to be maintained.
Aspirations
Yan wishes to live a balanced and comfortable life with lots of money by high paying developer jobs, she doesn’t feel the need to do anything great or spectacular or being the best in her job, she just feels as though her life needs to be good and healthy enough for her and her family. She doesn’t need much more than that. She just wishes to be happy.
Media consumption
Yan consumes a broad range of media despite only regularly using Discord, Messenger, Twitter and Youtube as her biggest sources of media. All of them serve a function, Discord and Messenger for communicating with her friends or family, Twitter for memes and fanart, Youtube as the biggest source of entertainment, whether it be short memes or anime compilations. She also uses spotify a lot. It’s the one app that she’s constantly on, whether it be future bass, J-ambient, jpop, electronic trap, vapor twitch, vapor wave, orchestral, classical, lofi, dubstep, korean r&b, piano, indie, jazz, hard rock, soft rock, 90s-60s, she’s listened to it all at least once. Although judgemental with other people's taste, she has a curious and open mind and would listen to everything regardless of the words that come out of her mouth. Because of her impartial view, she can’t really comprehend or agree with other people’s strong opinions or judgements, it gets overwhelming whenever she sees a strong topic on Twitter or Reddit, preferring to watch arguments from the sides, engaging with many possibilities; “what about this way” or “what if…”rather than forming her own concrete view, she tends to debate these little pieces of conflict in her mind before remembering its not worth her time. When asked about any topic, she responds with no real opinion as many trivial things don’t mean much to her, simply acting as random pieces of debris floating amongst a wide pool of knowledge.
Sport
Regarding sport, Yan has interest in the different kinds of sports and the theory behind different sports, tactics and skills involved. That doesn’t necessarily mean she can apply them for herself though, she prefers to take in the different ways of doing them and thinking of different strategies, the gap between her ideas and her real cultivated skill is far too large. Usually when she takes interest in a topic she will attempt to play around or try it out, then drop it out of boredom after realizing her physical ability is not on par with her theoretical play through, she will then replace it with another enticing skill. Despite not preferring to partake, she does hope to maintain a healthy lifestyle and in order to do so means physical activity, which she doesn’t mind sparing time for, albeit irregularly.
Profile 3: Hinoda Tomiko
Nationality: Japanese
Age: 16
Job: Senior highschool student
MBTI: ENFJ
Social Group: D
Hobbies
Tomiko is a studious daydreamer, she’s often seen at school, in the wide spare rooms. Despite being bare and dull, the rooms are normally lit up with her bright and charismatic energy, sifting through multitudes of inspiration she has laid on the floor. Upon the organized piles spread on the floor, she lifts a scientific study, and draws on the connections it has to all the other pieces, slowly forming her own ideas on the very topic. To her, everything is much like a spider web, all interconnected and she bears the responsibility of digging deep in all the relationships entities have to the rest of the world. In reality, outside of her brain and in the perspective of an outsider, she seems to look blank, processing the information and tearing it into sizable chunks, sitting still as she scans the paper in her tight grip, though this is very far from reality. She’s always reading between the lines, quickly and easily seeing all connections to the material on the floor. She isn’t looking at the paper anymore, she’s looking through it, too far deep in her own thoughts, and in a matter of seconds, she has formed a polished idea and can so easily visualize what it would look like in the plane of reality. No, this isn’t for a mind blowing experiment, nor a groundbreaking study, this is actually for a simple task and she‘s trying her best to deeply uncover the layers of her idea and composition to add to her art portfolio. Immediately, she begins working, splaying a mess of colors on her canvas, eagerly working towards the solidified thoughts in her mind. Within 6 hours, she’s finished… but in the process she has neglected her 3 other subjects.
This is the life of Tomiko, her raging and spontaneous obsessions carry her throughout the normally endless weeks, especially when her need for playful external sensory interaction and experimentation prevails. Her bright energy is a stark and welcome contrast to the mulling students that walk past winding corridors.
Typically, when she can’t seem to get a job done, she will opt to change her environments, or switch her skill sets. With a wide range of interests nestled within the same field of art, seen working on computer aided design programs, animation or editing projects on the fly is a normal occurrence when she gets bored. These include animation, editing, and computer aided design. She loves finnicking with software and experimenting to broaden her range of understanding and to add to the database that is her head. Doodling all over her drawing tablet, whether it be for commissions, school or for fun is a hobby she wishes to carry forever and hopes she could find a way to monetize her skill.
Likes/Dislikes
She loves talking with everyone and is always willing to give a helping hand, feeling as though she needs to be useful in order to be fulfilled. With her knack of understanding people she can mediate problems and create pieces that she knows everyone will enjoy, “as long as everyone is happy.” She also feels a strong need to achieve her goals, she will seek accomplishments and success to feel valued, for herself and for others. Because of this, she's incredibly prone to demotivation if not provided compliments and validation from being the best, often seeking admiration to add value to her life. She also likes watching others work, it adds to the information in her mind, anything is used as inspiration for everything, she also loves hanging out with others and supporting them on their endeavors, she’s very kind and considerate towards others, occasionally this may lead to others taking her kindness without giving anything back, making her feel hurt and drained.
Above all things, she loves warmly loving everyone and equally feeling the same love, it makes her feel whole. This happiness is contagious and her happiness lifts the mood of tense situations.
Home Life
Her home life is equally as loud as she is, with her 4 siblings Tomiko has learnt to balance everything in the hectic house of hers, constantly finding a peaceful way to settle things. When things get too hard and the future seems to be approaching too quickly or she feels like she’s living for others instead of herself, she gets overwhelmed and can be seen in the corner of her room, emptily burnt out without grips of her identity in the process of helping everyone else.
When she’s not alone, she's surrounded by her siblings, playing in the backyard with their dog. Her family is a mix of personalities, clashing and argumentative, it's often up to her to fix recurring issues as the oldest. Otherwise, she’s broadening her perspective by watching theories and different art forms for inspiration, whether it be Instagram, TikTok or YouTube.
Friends/Family/Relationships
Tomiko adores her family, although her siblings are generally annoying and it can be stressful, they're all extremely close, it's hard to hide anything in the family. They play pranks together, raise money for toys together and wage war against each other. In the end, they always help each other out and reconcile their problems with the help of Tomiko. Alongside Tomiko, her dog is usually out to stop any physical fights from starting, leaping on them to prevent fights from escalating and leaving the Hinoda family cooing.
Media consumption
Her main sources of media come from YouTube, Instagram, tumblr, discord and TikTok. She’s on most other platforms moderately to communicate and talk to friends, otherwise she’s using Spotify to set moods, her taste in music is a large range, spanning from indie, vaporwave, weirdcore, Disney instrumentals, classical, orchestral, K-pop/J-pop, punk and 50s-90s this is because of the influences of her family and other influences. She will mostly listen to different genres to hear what she's missing out on, not because she actually likes those genres. She doesn’t have a favorite, lingering on certain genres to fit in until she eventually falls in love with songs due to overexposure to them.
Sport
Tomiko is active in volleyball, and various other sports. It’s one of her favorite sources of entertainment and provides her the energy needed for most of her day. To her, sports are one of her ways of relaxing, it’s one of the few things she actively likes to do without having to think of anything too deeply.
Focus Groups
I used focus groups in order to understand what people would look for or think of when they see a magazine. I will then use this information to create a magazine to satiate all minds and preferences. I hope that whoever views my art will be able to take away something from it. In each version of my magazine there should be something for each person.
Sample
Dori: 12 years old, middle school student. She loves to play games with her friends as all 12 year olds do on the road to puberty. She's slowly gaining interest in music, the bass, and some of the arts trying to form her own identity.
Nadiha: 40, house wife, her interests include people watching, understanding human psychology and evaluating theories. She’s typically found reading a book to quench her thirst for knowledge.
Lyao: 17, high school student. A tired and exhausted student who has no time to develop any of her skills outside of school such as drawing and watercolors. As of now, she’s focusing on studying everyday, hoping to become a doctor and earn enough to live a stable life.
Aey Kimo: 23, university student. Studying engineering, he has no real time to focus on anything else, he hates studying. Some of his pastimes include being stuck in the Youtube rabbit hole and watching anime on illegal websites to avoid adding debt to his already growing student debt.
Kuzaha: 20, university student. Studying programming, his interests in UI/UX design has recently piqued as he has gotten tired of back end development. One of his interests include playing on VR headsets, Pokémon or other forms of video games. He has an eye for aesthetics and would often play games for the cute art styles or game mechanics.
I asked these people because they all have an interest in some form of arts, these few give me a broad range of modern and traditional art of all ages.
Key questions:
- Do you have an interest in the arts?
- What topics do you find interesting? What kind of videos do you usually consume?
- Are you a fan of graphic design? What kind of design do you like?
- What are your favorite magazines? What elements do they include? Do they include realistic photos or illustrations?
- Do you prefer informal or formal language used in magazines?
QUESTION 1 ANSWERS
Do you have an interest in the arts?
Dori: I DO! I love art… I’m pretty bad at it right now, but yeah! I wish I could get better. I think I kinda need to practice. So yeah! Do you wanna see it?
Nadiha: The arts are interesting, I appreciate modern arts and the arts in the museum. I think it's amazing that we get to live in an era where we can enjoy art and all of its wonders. It’s great to see how passionate some people can be in art.
Lyao: I enjoy it as something to do in my spare time, but I barely have time to do it nowadays.. I’m too busy all the time. I wish I could paint and create more, it's a shame.
Aey Kimo: Sort of? It’s okay I guess, I like fanarts of the anime I watch but I don't really understand the point of traditional fine arts.
Kuzaha: I think the arts are so versatile, especially when implemented in certain media, with the many art styles and colors you can convey so many moods and expressions. Especially in anime, the different art styles can be used for different forms or planes of reality, like in the anime movie Belle, where they switch to cgi when the main character hops into the virtual world, and typical hand drawn anime in the real world. Fanarts are also so, so, so good. Games especially can use art styles for moods, like in the story game firewatch, 12 minutes or stanley’s parable, art styles are so powerful and should really be appreciated more often.
QUESTION 2 ANSWERS
What topics do you find interesting? What kind of videos do you usually consume?
Dori: I like a lot of cutesy things. I watch many youtubers that review toys and things that look nice!
Nadiha: I watch a lot of life hacks and simple art tutorials. I'm pretty bad at art but since my daughter is great at it I thought I should give it a chance. As of now the things I find interesting are gardening, cooking and basic crafts. Other than that, I am not particularly present virtually. I’d rather stay grounded in reality, observing the world around me and all its different functions.
Lyao: Right now, I like discovering new music and editing stuff from anime and manga for clout. I don’t have enough freedom to do things I like so I just find things to do at home or online, like watching WWE or Netflix shows, romance movies, kdrama, reading romantic novels and rating the characters in them.
Aey Kimo: I enjoy underground movies and watching theories for those movies. It's just neat how deeply you can scope and unpack the layers of details in said movies. Sometimes, I do photography with the movies as inspo… My favorite kind of photos are candid since they provide a little bit of commentary on others lives, like movies. For the second question, I watch tutorials for photography, theory videos, VTubers, game commentary videos and so on…
Kuzaha: I mostly like very domestic things, I like going outside and taking walks, feeding ducks and spending time with nature, going on a spontaneous trip on a boat. Mainly nature, granted I don’t get the opportunity to succumb to most of my impulses considering my position as a student. I like doing simple things. I like that the food that is cooked is good. I like that I can travel around whenever I want to. I wish I could go out without being tied to my responsibilities and taking the title of a wandering nomad but unfortunately I can’t. Instead, although it’s on the opposite side of the spectrum, I take programming. I like it because it means I can create whatever I want and experience whatever it is everyone else is making. I especially enjoy using VR headsets, it's an entire universe in there, I can go wherever I want without restriction.
QUESTION 3 ANSWERS
Are you a fan of graphic design? What kind of design do you like?
Dori: Huh? What is graphic design? I am not really sure but I do like arts and crafts and the little designs of stuff online like the little stick figure fights people make or animatics that people draw for different fandoms!
Nadiha: Graphic design is a finicky topic, on one hand there are many beginners as technology progresses, on the other there are some great masters at all these ways of portraying a message across visually through infographics and little graphic designs. At the very least, that is my understanding of that topic. I haven’t delved into the specifics yet. My favorite, or the type I am most accustomed to are the illustrations on books, either in them or littered on the covers.
Lyao: Oh, I love graphic design, in every guide or video I need for school there’s almost always some form of graphic design that easily gets the message across. As a visual learner, I am really happy with this surge of visual art. I do also enjoy it outside of learning as well, I don’t know much about how to create it myself, but in terms of pure visuals like colors and shapes, most people get the basic idea down pretty well. My favorite design has to be realism. I don’t know if it’s an actual form of design, I just know about its art style counterpart. There has to be a realism sub category or design right?
Aey Kimo: I don’t really look too far down art, art is pretty unheard of to me since I am not around art in my major. The only types of art I am exposed to are anime and fanarts, but those don’t really count right? For design, I do know a lot of practical designs in my field of work, since our division usually pairs up with the design team when it comes to actual projects. We create and design together, so I am aware of industrial and product design made through CAD software. It’s disgustingly good.
Kuzaha: Ah design, while I am not customarily seeking out graphic design I love design in games, open world or sandbox games especially, the amount of skill to create all of those details is insane, the physics required drives me crazy. I don’t think that in my life as a programmer I will be able to replicate such detail. Perhaps as a story game creator I might, but I am not sure.
QUESTION 4 ANSWERS
What are your favorite magazines? What elements do they include? Do they include realistic photos or illustrations?
Dori: I haven’t seen many magazines, honestly. I think I like the ones with drawings and illustrations though because I don’t like reading.
Nadiha: I like magazines that are more realistic and formal, I tend to read any texts that catch my eye. I wouldn’t typically read the full thing unless the topics intrigue me. They generally include subjects of my interest or people, usually photos instead of drawings or illustrations.
Lyao: I love using magazines for scrapbooking and for outfit inspiration, so lots of my favorite magazines end up in pieces. As you can imagine, I like pretty aesthetic magazines with very nice shades of brown, or whatever theme I am looking for on that day. They would normally have elements that I think would fit for my scrap books, like little plant cut outs, stickers, cute patterns and so on. For outfits, the magazines I use would also look quite cozy. I tend to look at magazines catered towards my age range or older.
Aey Kimo: I only use magazines to look at things I like outside of engineering, sometimes they would be technology magazines that have lots of graphic design elements, other times they would be semi-realistic magazines with cars and football topics. I have basic normal tastes, so yeah nothing extraordinary. Honestly, I don’t even like to read them, I just look at the pictures or graphic designs.
Kuzaha: I haven’t touched a magazine in my life, but I imagine what I would like would include illustrations.
QUESTION 5 ANSWERS
Do you prefer informal or formal language used in magazines?
Dori: Too many words is enough, I don’t want lots of big words I don’t even understand.
Nadiha: I have no real preference since I can comprehend formalities, it really depends on the context and whether the magazine is enhanced by the language. I do think that unnecessarily formal texts can seem pretentious.
Lyao: I think the best way to read would be fast and informal text, but that’s only because I’m lazy. Formal language is good too if the magazine is supposed to be formal. I think formal language is beneficial for my scrapbooking so I might sway to that option.
Aey Kimo: I never actually noticed from the magazines I read, but I’m pretty sure that's because I didn’t read that much. I think they were usually informal.
Kuzaha: I divulge in many texts for content development research purposes, whether it be for poems or literature, although I don’t conventionally use magazines. I think I have enough experience to say that I have no preference. Although I do think that formal language can supply a lot more depth than informalities as they can give a deeper context for understanding with the many words.
Conclusion
After collecting all the responses from these interviews I managed to find different views on art and meet different people along the way. I have realized that I can't appease all of them, if I make a style for a specific demographic, it cannot be generalized, this is inevitable. There will always be a contrary force. I will still try to make something anyone can grow to enjoy, though I find that with this information I can manipulate my magazine to be viewed by the type of people I want it to be viewed by.