Drafts for My Main Article

My drafts have not come out very clearly on the scanner. But you can get the general idea of what my original image was going to be. I later changed my mind. Below are the stages my feature went through to get the final product.

This was my original finished product. But I thought the writing just blended into the background and it didn't look to professional.

I tried to put my text in black boxes to see if that make the page look more filled and make the writing stand out, but i didn't like how the page looked.

I then expanded the Arctic Monkey picture to back it the whole background of page one and I made page 2's background plain black.

Drafts for My Contents Page

Below are all the stages my magazine contents page went through until I got to the final page

This was original finished product but I thought it was too plain so I tried different things to fill the page.

I thought about adding more pictures along the side would help fill the page, but i didn't like the way the pictures looked with the main picture.

I decided to fill the bar with the listings of people who made the magazine, but I still had an empty space at the bottom of the contents. I added an advert and ATP Tour at the bottom to fill the space.

Drafts of My Magzine Cover

This was the first attempt at my magazine. But there was some aspects of the magazine cover that I didn't like such as the banner and the tagline was too high.



After a few adjustments this was the second stage of my magazine. I lengthed the banner and I moved the tagline to the bottom of the page.

This is my final product. The top of the page still looked empty, so I added another banner along the top including the web address.

Planning/Sketching Page Layout

This is a sketch of my front cover and how I originally wanted it to look. The scanner quality is not very good but you can see the general idea.

This is a layout of one of my original ideas for the shoot of what was going to be my feature, but I later changed my mind. Again the quality is not the best.

Shooting/Choosing Images

For my feature I decided that I wanted to do a live review and that I should get pictures from gigs. I fist looked at some of the bands I was going to see live performances and thought about what angles would be best and how to shoot them. Here are the live clips I looked at.

Arctic Monkeys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs_vhA8wUyE

Florence and the Machine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWjmDk4pWYk

The Horrors http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEIGU28GpGM

For my main cover I wanted to show the simplicity and how they include no gimmicks of the band so i had a simple cover involing no gimmicks. The shoot was taken in front of a white background and the artists were wearing either plain black or plain white clothing. They had easy poses and they looked natural.
After I took the pictures I choose which gig photos recreated the atmoshpere and the feel of the evening the most, and when I choose the cover picture I choose the picture that looked most natural and that looked the most symetrical.

Setting Up Images

When I was shooting my front cover image I wanted the background to be as plain as possible to make editing the picture simple. I put up a white sheet behind where I was going to take the picture to make the background just white. When doing some practice shots I noticed that I had a line of bright light going through the image due to the pacing of the sun. I then added some more lights around the scene to see if I lost the shadow but this didn't help as the sun was too bright. I then put up a sheet to block out the sun and lose the shadow. This worked meaning that we could continue with the shots, just making sure we watched out for where the sun moved to during the day and to fix the shadow accordingly so.

I took inspiation from a mixture of these images.

Planning/Sketching Images

Below is a sketch of my title, my front cover image and my original feature image, that I later went on to change.

As you can see the scanner didn't give my images the best quality on the computer.

Anazlysising Front Cover Images

The two magazines below I made notes on how the audience is represented by the image around the border but due to the scanner some have not appeared.

These are 2 magazine covers in which I took alot of inspiration.

Reseraching and Designing Mastheads

The first thing I did when I was deciding on a how my title should look for my magazine was to research other well known titles and see what made them so recognisable.
I looked at NME, Q, Plan B and Kerrang, here they are below.

For my magazine I thought that Plan B was the most appropriate for my audience and so i used this most as inspiration.

We researched what is suggested by different titles as to what could be inside of the magazine and what music genre it could be about.

After deciding on my title I tried to design it. Here is the original sketch.

Conventions of Magazine - Feature Page

When I started my feature I had alot of live images I had taken at gigs that I prefered to my photo shoot so I decided I should do a live review.
















There are many ways to set out a live review as you can see above but my favourite, and the most inspiring I found was Plan B. The writing going over the image I thought made the page look different and it would help fill all the space on the page without making the page look cluttered.


Conventions of a feature page include;

Images
Review
Quotes
"Live" title at the top of the page


I had featured all of these in my final product so that it is still a professional usable feature, even though it look unconventional.

Conventions of Magazine - Contents Page

When researching contents pages I realised there was a similar look to all of them, but as the ideology of my magazine is that it is independant and unique I wanted to avoid this.

From the images below you can see that a typical contents page consists of a couple of pictures with the features inside broken into separate sections.

I wanted my magazine to look different and I also wanted it to look more mature and sophiticated.

I then looked at a few more magazines such as Plan B and Artrocker. Their contents looked like this.

And I thought the single picture surrounded by the contents looked more mature then many pictures so this was the angle I went with. As you can see by my final contents page I took alot of inspiration from these.

Conventions of a contents page include...

Pictures

Features

Page Numbers

Multiple Colours

Title

Picture of the cover

I have still included most of these in my final version but I have changed the way the page looks to fit the ideology of my audience.

Conventions of Magazine - Front Covers

In the early stages of creating magazines I looked into the conventional products that make a magazine cover.

These included a logo, a tagline, banners, puffs and more.

Here are a few pictures of my research




















I found a magazine cover and I noted what made up the magazine. I then also looked at the different ways different magazines showed the change in their target audience.

Exploring Values/Ideologies of Different Music Magazines

An ideology is the beliefs and values of the audience reading the magazine. So for my magazine as it is a very femine magazine my audience would be females who are proud of being a girl yet they are still serious about music. By being proud of being a female that doesn't mean that they have to wear pink all of the time, have long blonde hair and love pop girl bands, they can be proud of the achievements women have made in the modern day today but still have a dark side. My audience would also like to be seen as an individual and would be proud to be unique. I hope my magazine reflects this and shows the individuality and feminity of my audience.

Researching the Target Audiences of Music Magazine

In the beginning I wanted to see what audiences would be general to each magazine. I also wanted to find a niche in the market that I could fill with my magazine. I noticed most magazines are targeted towards males or males and females, so I thought that I should make a magazine plainly for females.

One of the magazines we researched into its audience profile was NME.
http://www.nme.com/

NME's readers are 65% male and 35% female whos average age is 23. 72% are of the social demographic of ABC1 and 55% work full time.

By doing this we got a general idea of what the audience looks like and who they aimed their magazine towards.

Investigating the Market

I spent a few lessons at the begginning of the term investigating the market and looking into what type of music magazine I would like mine to be.

I wanted to find a niche in the market but yet still have a magazine that would be popular and sell well with the current competition. I still wanted to make a magazine that I found interesting as well so I started by looking at indie/rock music magazine. I looked at NME magazine and Kerrang! magazine to begin with. I prefered NME and I thought this would be better for my type of magazine. Kerrang featured many swear words and can be quite hard hitting on the audience, where as NME is more relaxed it can feature words or speak in a lanuage I don't understand. I looked into something inbetween that would suit a teenage reader, but this didn't appear. I decided that this was my niche.

I did also look to Artrocker and Plan B for inspiration on how I should set out my magazine but none of these fit my market perfectly.