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.