08 Moving onto the music magazine

I looked at plans of magazine covers to find out in which order I will put the features of the magazine, to see what looks best, including artists my readers will be fans of. I moved around the features to get the best effect depending on the image used. The flat plans helped me orgabise and plan what my front cover would eventually look like, helping me to have a better designed layout.

I intend to complete the music magazine project, completing a front cover, contents page and double page spread.

My target audience, those who I hope will be interested are young sociable people with a keen interest in indie music. I did audience research by conducting a questionaire to fans of the genre which will help me decide what to add to the magazine, seeing what is at the heart of my readers. For more information into the type of people who will read my magazine see the readership profile which includes information which I found. This shows the target audience to be creative intependant thinking older teenagers with their own ideas and views. They are interested in looking good, taking a pride in their appearance by searching for unique items from vintage shops, yet still shopping at the stylish topshop and topman. They spend their time at gigs and searching for new bands to listen to. They also really value their friends and many have a part time job to fund their various social activities whilst still attending college or university.

I believe that the media institution that would distribute my finished magazine would be EMAP. IPC Ignite! is another successful publishing group, however this is the company that publish the NME so would probably not go for magazine of the similar genre that an NME reader would already be interested in as it would create competition for the NME and the publishing group would be no better off. http://www.ipcmedia.com/ On the other hand EMAP do not currently produce any magazines of the music variety so there would be a gap in the market for mine to be distributed throughout the United Kingdom on a once a weekly basis. http://www.emap.com/ another advantage of EMAP is that it would be good for smaller publications to a smaller audience as it could be more reliable and trustworthy to stand by you whereas, ipc being the larger company may exploit the magazine.

05 College mag evaluation

Here are images of my completed contents page on the left and front cover to the right. Overall I am pleased with my work but I believe they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For instance I find that my front cover directly addresses the audience as there is a strong image pointing towards the reader. It makes people relate to the title look forward. I think this is a suitable title as students should be heading towards the future but also crates a positive effect. This positive thought is further backed up with the bright colours which I used. However the background colur sometimes makes it difficult to read the text as they are quite similar so I would rethink my colour scheme if I was to produce it again. I think that the image being placed under the priory creates a good effect as it is central and to the point. The priory is also a major landmark of Guisbrough, where the college is based. If I had to have a criticism of this it would be that the background is a litte unoriginal as I could've got a less obvious image. I also like the way on the contents page that the images are placed behind the text as it adds an extra element to the page as it is more interesting with other things going on. I will use my experience of creating the college magazine to develop it and be stronger on my main music magazine project. One way would be that on the contents page I was unable to remove the white strip on the background of one of my images. However I now have the photoshop skills to enable me to use the eraser tool which I was unable to before so can use the more effectively on my music magazine.

06 Planning the music magazine

Analysing an existing magazine cover

Now that the contents page and front cover for the college magazine are complete it is time to move on to the music magazine. To find out who my readers for the music magazine would be i put together another questionaire with more music related questions that were specifically towards the genre I am interested in. From these results the readership profile was put together where i had an overall view of what my readers interests and beliefs were and the meaning that i wanted to develop in my own magazine. I made this information look more presentable by including pictures from the genre.

To help with the music magazine I also analysed existing magazine covers. I found out what all of the individual features on the front of the magazine meant such as the menu strip and the kicker. I studied a front cover of Kerrang to see what impression it gave off. I also covered many different elements of the cover and what effect this created to the reader. This was by exploring the written, technical, symbolic and overall features.
Once I was familiar with the terms I arranged many different versions of my front cover using a flat plan design. This was altered by replacing, resizing and moving around the different features and placing a variety of shots in the background. The flat plans show use of space and the positioning of magazine conventions.
I am also working on my house style which will run through the magazine and be a consistent feature. This includes fonts, logos, banners, colour scheme and design. All of these will influence how my audience view the magazine and decide whether it attracts them or not.

04 Begining the college magazine

Recently in media the focus has been on creating the college magazine. The front cover and contents page were those that needed to be produced. On the contents page it displays what will be featured in the magazine. I developed this to suit the needs of the readers. The questionnaire helped me to establish an idea of what kind of people the audience would be aiming towards, therefor influencing what went into the magazine. I included college based features, music and fashion, as this reflects the comments that I recieved.

For the cover I researched existing front covers to see which styles existed, aiming to see what would be suitable for my cover. I found out that generally the styles were quite plain with just one figure with either a positive or thoughtful pose on the cover. I thought these covers just blended in a bit so aimed to make mine more colourful to stand out more and make college appear to be more of a fun activity.

With regards to the cover, I displayed the fact that there would be a free chocolate bar on offer. I decided to do this because it was a common trend within my results that free gift would encourage people to buy the magazine. Chocolate was what I chose as it would appeal to both genders, who I am directing my magazine towards, so it wouldnt exclude anyone. The main image on my cover is a medium close up of me, pointing directly at the camera. I believe this is effective because it grabs attention, looking as though I am adressing the potential buyer. It also fits into my title, look forward, as it is about personally looking towards the future and where their studies will take them.

03 Background information on audience

Practicing photographic technique

I decided to change my chosen music scene to indie, as this is the kind of music I listen to and have an interest in for use on the music magazine.
We are now making a questionaire and getting the results to help develop a college magazine, then we will eventually make a music magazine. I intend to create an even more complex questionaire to find out about my indie audience on the music magazine which will be targeted specifically towards people who would be part of my audience. These results will help us find out about the needs of the audience. The questionaire explores a range of different areas of life including fashion, music taste, income and social grades, interests, age, gender, including much more. By conducting the college magazine interview I can to the conclusion that Look Forward readers are students of the college Prior Pursglove. They are generally teenagers, around the age of 16 to 18 who are very outgoing and socially active with a wide range of interests, everything from sports to cookery. They listen to varied genres of music but the majority are poptastic. The females idolise Beyonce and Cheryl Cole as their stle icons, and the guys admire the likes of Ne Yo and Justin Timberlake. The readers fit into a comfortable social status, enjoying a life with many oppurtunities,which they, or more likely their parents, are able to fund.
For the college magazine front cover we needed a medium close up head shot. This could be done by using props and different photographic techniques such as the angle from which it was taken. The photo is then to be edited into a front cover on photoshop. I got practice for photography by instructing my model on which way to pose and using props.
We also researched ideology which meant we looked at politics and the beliefs of different political parties to explore their ideology. An ideology is a world view and overall way of looking at things showing a system of values, attitudes and beliefs which an individual, group or society holds to be true. This is important when producing the magazine because it needs to be aimed towards a group and the ideology they share needs to be considered so the views shown are suitable.
The way that media feeds us information was also explored. This was by looking at the hypodermic shringe theory which means when the media inject us with the information.

02 Research for audience

Up to now we have been studying representation in the media. The term refers to the construction of aspects of reality such as people, places, objects, events cultural identities and other concepts being shown as a certain way in the mass media. This will help as research for the ideas behind my audience and what appeals to them and how certain things in my project should be presented. We've looked at pictures of famous people and wrote connatation and denotation on them to see how they are presented. Its also given me to use photoshop for the first time where we designed our own perfume advertisement, choosing background, perfume bottle and model.
It's helped me further analyse pictures as we wrote a short essay about a fashion photograph. Stereotyping is another thing that we have covered, how certain groups are labeled. We went further into this by researching into a typically stereotyped music group, which will help for the magazine task, my choice was the emo music scene. This is a highly stereotyped music scene where by most emos are labelled as promoting death and other disturbing activities. However this was not to my personal preferance so I then went on to research indie rock music, which I eventually decided on.

01-Introduction

The main project was to produce a music magazine, however to assist with the production of this and start work on the music magazine we did practice task with making a college magazine. This would give photoshop practice, use of the cameras and help us to be able to develop this and improve our skills onto the music magazine.
To get some audience research I interviewed this group to find out what would capture their attention and explored existing indie magazines, such as NME. I intended to focus on the group of the indie music scene, which would be of a more rock based genre. Around this information from my niche market I could decide on the type of photographs, design styles, colour schemes fonts and graphics that they would be attracted to which would develop a house style. My college magazine is to be a more bright and simple style whereas I developed this once I was more familiar with the process for my music magazine onto a more detailed style with a dark and fiery colour scheme to appeal to the rockers in my target audience.