Draft of Production

This is my magazine cover designed and aimed at 

Masthead ideas

I have decided to use Dolce Vita and Dolce Vita light as a way to keep the font simplified yet still varying in the boldness and the way the reader can differentiate between the two. This will enable me to have a big masthead and a subheading of the same font while still showing difference between the two and allowing the style and overall ambiance of the cover and magazine to remain the same.

Looking at indie albums we see a consistent style of simplicity and etherealness stirring up thought in the audience as they look at the image and font. 

For instance here we have Anavae's recent EP album:

the style is seamless and nothing seems out of place because of the simplicity of everything, if they had chosen to go for something more loud like pop music it would appeal less to the indie-genre audience

For instance we have Jessie J's album: 

The main element of this album cover remains to not be one of simplicity but one to catch your eye with all the different mise-en-scene and use of an actual person with all the in-your-face props.

To back up my point further here's another example of an indie band album cover:

granted tonight alive's album cover has more to it than Anavae, but the resemblance is unmistakeable.

Images to be used for production [to be continued]

Plan for the Magazine

The front page will have a single image with the picture of the band of which I will be using a single image to maintain the simplicity and give the magazine the 

this is the plan for the images and the thought that went into taking the shots

Moodboard, an analysis and summery

This is a mood-board of alternative rock bands and their photos being taken. As seen, the style differs from just normal rock as they appear more relaxed in this imaging choosing to actually just dress how they want, despite the fact that it might go against their image. Their posing is typically more of the 'thoughtful' and 'rebellious' type or simply just standing how they would in a normal situation.

Music magazine coursework research

Research; Music Magazines

As it can be seen the magazines all follow a similar pattern of which a series of information is thrust into the readers face, drawing them in by the bright text and as we can see mainly female covers. The use of a female on the screen allows the reader to be attracted whether a male or female. Not only that, because many females of today's society are insecure and as such influenced by the dominating media institutions such as tv, magazines and movies who enforce the everlasting idea that females must fit a certain image of a slim, yet busty woman. Of course they differ depending on the genre of the actual magazine, as evidence shows the difference between the first two; one being grunge and the other being clean cut and clearly pop.

Preliminary Evaluation of Cover and Contents page

My front cover while didn't have too much focus on it still had thoughts planning it out however I did move around a lot in general to experiment and see what works best. While I had a general plan in paper and plan, a majority of this was done on the fly since the plan was very flexible and allowed me to change quite a lot of it.

My media product uses lots of the same conventions that many of the real media products use, such as incentives such a competitions and such, it uses a majority of subtitles to grab attention with one of them as they vary in topic appealing to all different types of people. Moreover it uses the big title with a simple typography so to not clutter the cover and steal all the attention to the subtitles on the sides.

My product represents a majority of students in the society but within that social group of students resides more groups and cliques, but my media product doesn't necessarily focus on one, it varies in topic and branches out to all different types of people allowing it not to focus on one group in particular which could be seen as a bad thing however I feel it allows the community of students to feel more at one instead of segregated by likes, dislikes, opinions and such.

The kind of media institution who would distribute my magazine would most likely be the schools that it is about, and the neighbourhood that it resides in, moreover if it did particularly well it could even in some cases be sent to the homes of the students in the education institute.

It challenges many of the electronic forms of which people prefer to use to potentially have 'school news', or even in some schools; they choose to use social media to get the school news across, some use Twitter, others use Facebook and perhaps a few even use blogger regularly, it seems they've been catching up on the latest use of these many electronics, and what's more have found someone who actually know what they're doing. Whereas the traditions would be to send newsletters on paper something that's being veto'd more these days in favour of the cheap and easily accessible internet.

The audience for my magazine was originally planned for be for 11-18 year olds in the education gap, however it may be inching towards the female gender more as they are more likely to read stuff like this and actually want to try some of the things in my magazine. I have attracted this audience by use of devices such as the aesthetics such as the colour and simple layout of the front cover and the contents page. Furthermore I used incentives such as competitions and interesting articles as part of my way to draw my audience. The picture I chose is also something I chose with the audience in mind as this allows them to see that the magazine is quite on their level and contains stuff they would be able to associate themselves with due to their age and their likes and dislikes.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
While compiling my two products I have learnt that it's not particularly the use of technologies of which allow you to make the cover and contents page particularly appealing or even looking professional but simply the understanding of the use and the creation of the cover. You could also say that I have learnt that in order to make it look professional you need to be able to see from the eyes of your audience also understanding that positioning is incredibly important and even a small change can make an enormous improvement on the cover making it seem less like a child has simply stuck things down.

Representation is incredibly important in the media industry as the knowledge of this and understanding of your audiences interpretation can make an entire change of their view on the piece of media. See from a students point of view I would see this cover as not as professional as many of the published magazines in that part of the media industry however I would say that with my tools of technology I have accomplished a good cover as I made sure to remember the rules of colour coding and such, not so much with the contents page and the cover however. But on the whole while I think there could be many improvements on the colour scheme, and the idea of who to aim it at as I think I was getting a little confused who I should aim it more at. Also the font needs dire improvement because at the moment it's incredibly dull and what's more can be seen as not much individuality. Choice of font has a big effect of the appearance and the appeal to the many audiences.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Research

For my research I gathered many different types of front pages, ones that were both good and bad and I annotated many of them in all different ways allowing me to potentially see what things I would need to ensure that I do or don't do when designing my front page. 
Alternatively I also took different parts of a magazine and labelled them with the different things that would contribute to a good magazine. Things such as titles and straplines on the front pages. Moreover we looked at the different features that would help persuade the audience to actually buy and read the magazine such as the colour schemes and the pictures used amongst the captions.

Moreover we didn't just look at the non-published, made for school ones but the professionally made ones, also looking at their featured articles and connotating them and the devices and things they used to appeal to the customer/reader. We also looked at things we could take which we could use for our own coursework.

I think personally that getting the unprofessional looking school magazine covers and putting them against the ones that do look good was a good exercise because it allowed us to differentiate exactly what we would want to do and how we would go about ensuring that the outcome would be good. Furthermore looking at what we want out of the cover is a good part since I share many attributes with my target market of 11-18 year old students, male and female alike.

Examples include, 

As you can see we made sure to dissect them and break them down to see what was good and bad about each cover, which also helped up developed our understanding of what would make a good magazine cover and appeal to our target audience.