5. Production

Final music magazine cover

I based my magazine cover on a wide range of different music genres. The main image I used is of a girl-band called 'The Soundwaves' who were used in my feature which was an interview on the band. The models are all stood the same & their positioning is quite casual apart from the hand gestures which were made to spell out the word 'LOVE'. I editing this photo using Photoshop and tried to make the hand gestures more sharp so that they stood out from the actual picture. I also edited the rest of the picture making it more clearer and airbrushed so that it looks more professional to the audience. I had to cut around the tops of 2 of the models head to go over the masthead making it look more 3D and effective. I also positioned my central image as close up and into the centre of the page as possible following the generic conventions of a magazine cover. I made the masthead the largest graphic on the cover as it should be one of the main features. I chose a text off of dafont.com that was quite plain but could  be easily edited so it stands out. I did this by using drop shadows and adding depth to the text. I made it a bold black as the buttons that I put underneath the masthead used most of the colours that I wanted to use in my scheme. I used a flash in the top right hand corner and made it 3D, saying free downloads. This draws the reader into the fact that there is something free on offer with the magazine. In the same colours I put a banner in  the bottom right corner with a feature on and put the rest of the features under a plus in the bottom left hand corner which spreads the information being put onto the cover out. The main article was called 'introducing The Soundwaves' I put this over the central image but not covering any main parts. I used the FX feature in Photoshop to make it stand out from the picture and coloured it a light teal colour.

Final contents page

My contents page is very bold and I think sums up the magazine very well as it features different genres of music and different types of people. I used a different colour scheme to my cover as I thought black and white looked very professional as they are classy colours. The photos I chose were of 4 different models, one looking very rock, another looking very girly, another looking r&b styled and one with an indie vibe. I rearranged the pictures in a way that would frame the rest of the text well and didn't draw attention away from the rest of the page. I haven't seen this style of contents page used in any magazine that I researched, so I made it like this as I wanted it to be unique and different. I made the background gradient from white, through to grey, then the top black. I wanted a dark background for my page but didn't want it to look tacky, plain or boring so I chose to do it like this. On the left side and the bottom around the edges I created an effect on Photoshop that made it look a bit more interesting and also framed the page. The masthead was a font that I fount on dafont.com and I rearranged the lettering so it wasn't all on one line. I saw this done on a contents of another magazine cover, I liked this idea so I used it but made it my own. Down the right hand side of my contents I put the featured articles and the regular articles, also a letter to the editor at the very bottom. As I had gradiented the background, I had to gradient the texts too making them a lighter colour at the top, and the bottom ones black so that they didn't blend in. I separated the sections with a bold black line that has the same appearance as the titles 'features' and 'regulars'. The features included exclusives that were in the magazine as a one off and the regulars were pages that are involved in every issue. At the very bottom was a letter from the editor, including a picture of me. I used a italic hand-writing like font for the title 'dear readers' and then used a normal font for the letter but had to make it really small so that it fitted in with the proportions of the page numbers and descriptions.

Final Article

I changed the colour scheme for my article to give the magazine some variety. I chose the font for my title 'the soundwaves' off of dafont.com then coloured it a dark pink on photoshop. To create the article I used Adobe Indesign. Underneath the title of my page is who wrote the article. I made the very first letter of my writing larger than the rest so that it stood out from the paragraphing. I had a large picture covering most of the right-hand page and then two smaller images with a drop shadow effect. I put a box at the bottom the same colour as the title with the page number, magazine title and the month the magazine had been published. Inside the article I had quotes in boxes that the girlband had said making this one of the first things that the reader see's, drawing them into the article.

4. Design

Mood-boards


Before creating my magazine, I made a few mood boards to put my ideas together and to see what I wanted on the real designs. I made a mood board of different music artists, themes and colours, music magazine covers and different fonts and texts.

This is my mood board of different artists; I tried to choose a variety of genres such as r&b, pop, rap etc. All the artists that I chose are in the charts recently and are always in the public eye, this means that the readers will know who the artists are as they are very well known especially by teenagers and music lovers. All of these artists are ones that would feature in my magazine.

This mood board is of different colour schemes, layouts and themes of magazines. I chose 4 different colours; these were blues, red, yellows and pinks. This gave me a lot of inspiration on my design as it shows you all the different ways a magazine article, cover and contents could be set out. In the end I chose a colour scheme of aqua for my cover but also used a few more colours such as purple, black, grey and teal. On my contents the colour scheme was a simple, classy black and white, and my article colour scheme was a girly pink/purple

This mood board is of different music magazine covers which fit in with my genre of music, this helped me to decide how to layout my final cover and what needs to go on it. It showed me the generic magazine conventions that I needed to use and also what stands out on a cover. All these magazine covers were suitable for my target audience and I also think that they are very appealing to that age group. This really helped me on what I needed to put in my final design.

This mood board I created was of different fonts off dafont.com that I liked the look of. These were all to put onto my magazine cover, contents and article. Looking back on it not many of the fonts were suitable for the magazine so in the end I chose some others. This helped see what different fonts look like together and then I could also refer back to this for the names of the fonts.

Mock-ups


After making these 4 mood boards, we then thought about what to put onto our actual magazine designs. To help with this we did mock-up of contents and magazine covers with all the techniques that we have learnt from our research.

This is a mock-up of a magazine cover. I used most of the features on this on my real magazine such as the flash and the banner but not the text as I put the ’20 exclusive articles’ onto this instead of it being on the side of the page. I didn’t like the masthead on this as I felt that it didn’t fit in with my genre of music or the theme that I was going for.

This is my second mock up of a magazine cover. On my real cover I used the mastheads icons, changed the colour and incorporated it onto a new masthead. I also used the plus sign with the features but made it smaller and again changed the colour. I didn’t really like anything else on the cover as I thought that it looked quite tacky and too graphical, not professional.

This was my final mock-up and was my least favourite. I thought the other 2 ideas that I had fitted in much better as this looks more of a mix and match and doesn’t really fit together very well.

This was a mock-up of a contents page that I never was able to finish. I thought that the play button and features worked well as it tied in with one of my mock up covers. The layout of the pages worked well as it had the main feature then a description about it underneath. I tried out using 2 picture boxes at the bottom with page numbers in but then I wasn’t too keen on using this idea.

This was a second mock-up of a contents page. I really liked this one as the colour scheme was very girly and pretty, especially the graphical feature at the bottom. I didn’t use this one as I thought that it wasn’t very music magazine, it looked more like a fashion magazine. I liked the title and also the January 2012 features part but I thought that the editor’s letter could have done with more work. I never got to finish this mock-up properly as I spent too much time doing my mock-up covers but if it was finished then it may have looked more professional.

My final mock-up contents page was the one that I actually used for my final design so i do not have a mock up of this.

3. Target Audience

There are many steroetypes of who reads music magazines due to the genres which are Rock, R&B, Pop, Rap, Indie etc. The target audience that i have chose for my magazine is teenagers/young adults and mainly female, although it could attract male attention aswell. The genre of music that i chose is a variety of different types and is mainly mainstream chart music that is always in the public eye. To do this i used a variety of techniques that would attract the audience such as the pictures that i used, the texts, the colouring and the models in my magazine.

2. Research

Music magazines are magazines that are dedicated to artists, bands and different types of music culture. They mainly include music news, interviews, photo shoots, radio reviews, new releases, celebrity gossip, concerts and some include a free album of music or free music downloads. Music magazines are very popular in the United Kingdom, with the first published magazine in 1926 called Melody Maker who then became rivals with the NME magazine which was first issued in 1952 and is still very famous today. NME is the worlds greatest and influential weekly music magazine which is known for creating the first singles chart, bringing punk into the wider world and being funny, critical and truth telling about music journalism. Several other British magazines such as Select and Sounds also folded between 1990 and 2000 and some current UK music magazines include Q, Kerrang! and Mojo. Some magazines in the industry have done so well that a TV show has been made based on the magazine, these are mainly pop music and are aimed at a younger market such as Top Of The Pops and Smash Hits which is now a music channel and radio station.

Publishing

Bauer Media Group is a multinational media company headquartered in Hamburg, Germany which operates in 15 countries worldwide. Worldwide circulation of Bauer Media Group's magazine titles amounts to 38 million magazines a week. The Bauer Publishing Group has grown into a worldwide publishing and media company and comprises 282 magazines worldwide in 15 countries, as well as TV and radio stations. It is popular for publishing Q magazine in 1986 and Mojo magazine.

Prometheus Global Media, formerly e5 Global Media, is an American entertainment publishing company based in New York City. The company was formed by the sale of the entertainment and media division of Nielsen Business Media in December 2009 and is most popular for publishing Billboard magazine.


Time Inc. is a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Time Warner, the company formed by the 1990 merger of the original Time Inc. and Warner Communications and it publishes 130 magazines. It also owns the UK magazine house IPC Media, whose major titles include What's On TV, NME, Country Life, Marie Claire and Nuts.

Emap Limited is a British media company, specialising in the production of business-to-business magazines, and the organisation of business events and conferences. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but is now owned by Apax and Guardian Media Group. "EMAP" is an acronym, standing for East Midland Allied Press. It is famous for publishing the music magazine Smash Hits.

BBC Magazines is the magazine publishing division of BBC Worldwide, the commercial subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation. They published the magazine Top Of The Pops.

6. Evaluation

Forms and Conventions

The media product that I produced, which was a music magazine cover, contents and double page article, followed the general conventions and forms of a real media magazine. The magazine cover consisted of a large central image of a new up and coming girl band called ‘The Soundwaves’. The lighting I used for the photo was very bright and they stood against a white background so that they stood out. Each girl spelt out a letter with their hands to make the word LOVE, I thought this was a good idea for my photo as it show the closeness of the band and also it hasn’t been done on a cover of a magazine before, making it look very original and different. On top of the central image, I put the title of the lead article which was introducing, and then the sound waves. I thought that this stood out on top of the photo mainly because of the colour choice and the two different fonts. I chose the title of the magazine to be VIBE as I thought that this fitted the genre of my magazine well and fitted in with the music theme. Underneath this I made a graphical feature of play and pause buttons and fitted them in with the colour scheme of the magazine which was blacks, blues, greys and purples. I used the generic conventions of a magazine cover such as the date, the price, barcode, a banner including an article, and a list of extra features included in the magazine.

Representation of Social Groups

The social group that I represented on my magazine cover was appealing to teenage girls. I created a girl band called ‘The Soundwaves’ and posed them on my cover. All the girls were dressed differently to complement each other but also looked very fashionable and edgy, following the style of a typical girl band. They were all very pretty girls but were all quite different in the way they look, they all looked polished but still had uniqueness to them. The fashion choices also showed each of the girls personalities, which is then gone into more depth in my article. I think that this appealed to a teenage audience as the girls are around the same age, and could be seen as role models especially to the younger audience. It’s a very girly looking magazine so the majority of buyers would be girls rather than boys. The music genre that I chose is a mixture of all different types of music such as pop, r&b etc. as it caters for a wide audience, but mainly teenagers. The is done by the different variety of people and clothing on my contents page as it attracts different types and styles of people and also the girl band on the front being a role model, as teenage girls would aspire to be like them and I think that that is the main attraction.

Distribution

A Media institution such as Prometheus Global Media would distribute my media product, as the magazine Billboard published by these is very similar to mine. As my target audience would consist of a younger generation, it would be suitable to make the magazine available in different ways such as making it available for viewing online. I also feel that a company such as Time Inc. could publish my magazine as they publish NME which is a rock magazine; publishing VIBE could attract a larger audience as the magazine is multi-genre. Also both of these companies do radio stations which would lead to more advertising of my magazine.

Audience

I tried to apply the typical conventions of my genre to my music magazine to attract a certain type of audience. The audience that I wanted to appeal to was mainly teenage girls of the social group/class of 16 – 20 year olds, these are the older teenagers who are turning into young mature adults, who are trying to build their confidence and become independent individuals, looking up to role-models. I wanted to portray my target audience, in a way that breaks the classic stereotype and the audience that I chose mainly spend their money on items such as music, magazine, clothes etc and my magazine caters for all of this. To make sure that this was effective, I asked a range of people from male to female consumers these questions...

What is your favourite artist?

What is your favourite genre of music?

Do you usually buy magazines?

If so what would you buy?

What content would you like to see in a magazine?

Do you ever buy CD’s or pay for downloads?

If you download how do you download/access your music?

What attracts you to a music magazine?

This gave me an insight into what was needed in my magazine to attract that specific audience. Knowing that 16 – 20 year olds are more interested in mainstream music and the popular music genre my magazine represents than any other age group, therefore this was the most fitting audience. In order to attract this certain type of audience I made sure I used a variety of different pictures and used banners and flashes that stood out from the cover, making it more eye-catching. As this age group does not have a lot of money compared to what a middle-aged person would have, I made the magazine monthly rather that weekly and made it at the affordable price of £3.99. I attracted the audience to the magazine making them feel part of this universe of celebrities, making them aspire to be like the celebrities characterized in my magazine. I used the relevance of the magazine to catch the attention of the targeted audience and I used the language and lifestyle to address the audience.

Media Technologies

Throughout making my magazine I learnt many new skills and how to use programmes that I had never used before. I am not the best at using technology but the programmes that I used were fairly useful. To create my magazine cover and contents I used either Photoshop or Serif Photo Plus X4 and to create my article I used Adobe Indesign. I learnt how to edit photos, import texts off of dafont.com and how to use blogger to present my work. Also I had to make my photos look professional, I did this by using Cannon MD 101 to take my photos with and on some photos I also used a photographers backdrop.

 

Personal Progression

Looking back over my work I feel that I learn a lot and progressed through this. I developed my understanding of the magazine industry by research and also my understanding of different technical programmes. Before starting my actual magazine design, I did 3 mock ups of covers and 3 of contents pages. This helped me decide what I wanted to put on the real thing as I had a chance to see what worked and what didn’t, also I could take ideas from each one to make my final work better. I took on feedback from my teacher and classmates and this really helped me as I could see what it looked like from other people’s views. To make sure that my cover was up to a high standard, I practiced how to use Photoshop to get the right affects and also looked for tutorials which helped a lot. I think that my final product looks professionally laid out and none of the graphical features or texts look tacky.

1. Preliminary Task

Analysis of three existing school magazine covers, design process and production process of the cover and a mock-up of the contents page of a new school magazine.

Analysis of 3 school magazine covers

The masthead is central in the middle on the cover and the main word ‘art’ stands out making it clear what the magazine is based on and around the masthead are artistic pictures also showing this. The cover is mainly in black and white and looks as if it’s on lined paper which portrays that it is a magazine for school pupils. Some of the typeset is in different colours, yellow and purple, which make it stand out from the rest as they are bright and eye-catching to the reader. The typeset is also in a different style font making it look more interesting and excitable especially to school children that the magazine is aimed at. The slogan of the magazine would be ‘Art. Creativity. Life.’ which is located underneath the masthead. On the left hand side is the puffs which shows a taster of what’s inside the magazine and it is separated away so it doesn’t take the main focus of the cover and it also carries on the colour scheme throughout.

The cover of this school magazine is set out like the front cover of a yearbook on lined paper which shows the theme of school. The central image is different images of the school buildings scattered on the page as if they have been ripped out and placed down. The masthead is also as if different letters have been ripped out and scattered on the page and the typeset is in capital letters, bold and in black writing so that it stands out clear off of the page. The school logo is located under the central image in the school colours and underneath that is the year that it had been issued. The colour scheme is very simple throughout and looks professional.

The central image is of a boy playing a piano in this magazine is overlapped by the copy and at the side the puffs tell you what the image is about which is also the main article of the magazine as shown on the cover. The colour scheme is very bright and colourful which is eye-catching, attracting school children to read it. The masthead is located at the top of the page and stands out as it is in very bold print and a striking colour. There is an advertisement down the left hand side saying ‘free revision timetable’ which might make school children more interested and want to look at it more. In the bottom left hand corner is a flash which stands out from the rest of the cover due to the shape and colour of it. The puffs are all in different colours separating them from each other but they follow the colour scheme of the magazine and don’t draw attention to them keeping the main focus on the masthead and the central image.


Analysis of 3 music magazine contents pages

The contents page of this magazine is very busy and crowded but looks very effective as it follows the same theme throughout and is lay out in a very organized way. At the top of the page is the magazine logo and then the title of the page which is 'contents'. On the left hand side is the ‘features’ of the magazine with a picture of one of the pages that is inside the magazine and the page number it can be found on,underneath this is a list of the main features and the page numbers. Q feautures old artists aswell as new which helps bring in a wider audience to the magazine. Scattered around the page are pictures of what’s inside the magazine and then the page numbers on top of them showing the reader where to look for the certain thing they would like to read about that catches thier eye.

The contents page of this magazine is very simple and sticks to the same theme throughout the page using bold colours. On the left hand side are pictures of what’s inside the magazine making the reader want to know more about them and each picture has a small caption saying what it shows. On the right hand side of the page there is the magazines masthead and underneath is the contents of the magazine where the different pages are categorized under headings. At the very bottom of the page the puffs show information and a picture about the writers of the articles inside the magazine and where to find them.

This content page’s main focus is the picture in the bottom right corner as it takes up most of the page and draws attention to it. At the very top of the page is the magazine's masthead then underneath is the title showing the month the magazine was issued and the year then telling the reader it’s the contents page. The page follows the same colour scheme throughout and looks very professional but simple. The pages are all categorized under different headings and have a small amount of information underneath some of them.

Mock-up of school magazine contents and cover

 

These 4 pictures are mock-up magazine covers that I roughly drew, for my final mock-up I chose the third picture as it followed the criteria needed whereas the other 3 were much better drew but didn’t match the criteria.

This is a mock-up school magazine that I drew and got scanned into the computer then coloured on Photoshop. It roughly shows the main techniques that editors use to make a magazine cover described in the analysis of the three school magazine covers.

This is a mock-up of a school contents page that I drew then got scanned into the computer and coloured on Photoshop. It shows all the different contents that would be involved inside the magazine and how to find them, this page also shows all the different techniques that an editor would use on a contents page.

                                                

This is my final design for a school magazine in which I used a camera to take a mid shot photo of a student holding folders and used a fairly plain background inside of a school to continue the theme. I used Photoshop to put it all together and to create the graphics. For the masthead and the other titles I used dafont.com to find interesting texts that will stand out on the cover. I made them colourful and eye-catching, which I think will attract students to the magazine.