For my second blog post, I decided to examine the website design for one of my favorite online magazines. Bauce Magazine is a lifestyle site for “self-made women”, and they pride themselves on creating content that relates to young women with ambitious who come from multicultural backgrounds. They want to inspire women and make the recognize how much potential they have to make an impact on the world, become financially independent and slay while doing it.
The first time I came across Bauce Magazine’s website, I was scrolling down my Instagram newsfeed, came across their page as a suggestion, and clicked on the link in their bio. After just a little bit of browsing, I definitely felt like this online publication was for me, so I follow the Instagram, page and bookmarked the website on my laptop. After recently revisiting the website, I started to wonder what it was about Bauce Magazine that made me like it so much. I begin to realize Bauce was addressing a specific rhetorical situation. In terms of text publication, a rhetorical situation is, “the circumstances in which an author creates a text. Authors have to pay attention to…their intended audience, their purpose for communicating, and the context in which their text will be read” (Ball et al., 35). This being considered, If I am the target audience of Bauce, which I strongly believe I am, then the design of then it is a good example of how rhetoric is supposed to work in a multimodal project.
Let’s examine the home page. The first thing the eye might be drawn to is the photo of the woman looking down, then perhaps you look at the makeup brushes, then the hands holding money. After you take in the images, you then might read the text at the bottom of each, like the one on the picture of the woman that reads, The Tall Girls’ Guide to Professional and Personal Perfection. This touches on two factors of the websites’ rhetorical situation: audience and context. The audience is, “…the intended readership for the text” (Ball et al., 37). And context is, “…where the text is published…how it is meant to be read…what surrounds it…or when it was made…” (Ball et al., 41). So, for Bauce, given what’s displayed on their home page, intends for their readers to be young women, as I previously mentioned.
If this website was for a different demographic, let’s say, children, the context would be much different. Perhaps there would be bright colors, images of children playing with toys, and a recognizable cartoon character. Here, the context and audience kind of go hand in hand. Bauce is published online, mostly likely meant to be read on a smartphone and or computer, the home page has images of female hands holding money, makeup brushes, and woman wearing a cute pink dress looking down to show off her eyeshadow. If you explore the website even more, you’ll find articles with titles like 11 Media and Entertainment Internships for Women of Color, likely accompanied by pictures of women as the cover photo. So, who is likely to read and interact with this online publication? Young women who want to be successful in their careers, but look good at the same time. As a student who is currently studying digital publication, and a young woman who considers herself to be ambitious, I think I made a good choice by investing time into navigating Bauce Magazine’s website.
Word Count: 578
Work Cited:
Ball, Cheryl E., et al. Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. Bedford/St. Martins, 2018.
Membis, Liane. “Bauce Magazine.” Bauce Magazine, 2018, baucemag.com/
All images are screenshots of http://baucemag.com/