Audience Profile

This is my audience profile


 

Existing names and mastheads

 

 

Audience Survey Results

Audience survey

Conventions of music magazines

 

 

 

Feedback about proposal

 

Proposal

 This is my proposal for my magazine. I found the proposal to be an important step in creating my magazine as it gave me basic outline of what I wanted to include. I included details of the genre, target audience, frequency, freebies and competitions of my magazine

Name ideas

After analysing different music magazines for a previous homework task, I quite liked the idea of having an acronym for the name of my magazine - for example the magazine New Music Express is shortened down to the initials NME. Q magazine also uses an acronym in their title as the name of the magazine is simply shortened to the very basic and simple letter of Q. I believe this is more effective as it makes the magazine easy to remember and recognise. I decided to imitate this idea and came up with acronym 'TMM' which stands for 'The Music Magazine'. I believe this name is effective and good as the title is very simple and easily recognisable. I also liked the name 'ME' also known as 'Music Express' but believed this was too similar to the name of the original magazine of NME. After some discussion, I found myself disliking the phrase 'Number 1' as the name for my magazine as I thought it sounded like a typical name in the music industry and conveyed the genre of R'n'B rather than the genre of my magazine - pop rock. Furthermore, I believed the names 'Dynamic' and 'Strings' would sound too obvious making the magazine seem less professional in comparison to the acronymic name 'TMM'.

 

 

I also created a selection of different mastheads for each individual word and phrase from my name ideas to see which design would be most appropriate for my magazine. Before creating these designs, I decided to look back at a range of different music magazines to see what I believed were the most successful mastheads. I really liked the idea of having a box around the outside of my masthead as I believe this makes my design look more organised and structured. Overall, I really like the design of 'TMM' masthead with the red box around it as I believe this masthead looks professional and sophisticated. I will perhaps think about using this design for my final product.

 

Project Log 16.10.13

During today's lesson, I began generating name ideas for my magazine. Before starting this task I looked back at other magazines and thought an acronym as my title would be more creative and imaginative than a simple phrase such as 'Top of the Pops'. Although I ideally wanted an acronym as the name for my magazine I also came up with different names of a compound, phrase and connotative. After I came up with a long list of names I decided to add different fonts and texts to see what they would look like if they were designed differently. I found this task to be quick and easy as I already had an idea of the type of names I already liked. After I completed this task, I uploaded it to scribd and my blog.

Double page spread analysis

 

Analysis of contents pages

 

Mood board

 

 

This is my mood board I created using the programme PowToon.

 

After researching different magazine covers, I quite like the idea of having a close up shot of the music artist as my main image. I noticed from Q magazine, the female artists shown on the front cover pages are conveyed in quite a seductive way, this is to appeal to the primary audience of men aged between 16-30.  I ideally wanted a female artist on my front cover, however I would have to take into consideration the target audience  and design the magazine so it would appeal to men. I also noticed how the artists displayed on the front cover are depicted in quite a serious manner as they give direct eye contact to the reader and are shown to not smile. I like this idea as it makes the magazine look more professional.  The cover models are also dressed in black in some way to emphasise the genre of the magazine – pop rock. For example the use of body language by Florence Welch on the front cover of Q shows her to have black nail varnish whereas the lead singer from NME magazine is dressed in a black top. I hope to include the colour black in my cover model . I also plan to have a house style of the colours red, white and black shown from both magazines as these colours are simple but give the magazine a sophisticated look. In addition, I quite like the logo’s of the two very popular magazines Q and NME as they are very simple yet effective.  Furthermore, the sell lines displayed to both sides of the magazine are positioned so they don’t overlay the main image and are highlighted in white which makes it more noticeable for the reader. The link for my moodboard is http://www.youtube.com/v/pMQ2U4o-jG8?version=3&f=user_uploads&c=google-webdrive-0&app=youtube_gdata"

Analysis of a range of front cover magazines

 

 

I found this task to be very useful as it helped me gain a better understanding of the different layouts, images, colours and mastheads I could incorporate into my own magazine. This task also helped me to develop my ideas further into the style of magazine I should create - do I want a multi genre magazine such as Q magazine which includes pop and rock artists or do I want a heavy rock based magazine such as Kerrang? While researching for different front cover magazines I decided to choose these three; Q, NME and Kerrang! as they all look professional and follow the typical conventions of a front cover page. Out of the three front covers I most like Q as the layout of the page is much more simple in contrast to Kerrang! In addition, Q magazines includes a variation of different text sizes, fonts and subtitles. I believe this task will help me for future tasks to develop my magazine further.

Preliminary Task Project Log

 

 

This is a video version  illustrating the different steps I took during the preliminary task. The written version of this project log can be found below:

At the beginning of the course we were welcomed by this year’s theme – a music magazine, having not done media before I was rather excited about the prospect of creating and designing my own magazine.  To begin with, we were set a preliminary task which involved creating a magazine for the school.  In our first lesson, we went around the school and took a variety of pictures including portrait and landscape shots using a DSLR camera. I decided to take a picture of my two peers Natalie and Oscar with the background of the school behind to represent student life. I later chose this photo to be displayed on my cover page. I also took photographs of the demolishing of the old sports gym and used these for my contents page.

In the second lesson, we sketched out our draft designs for the cover page and contents page of our magazines. I began drawing my design in pencil as I was still unsure on a name for the magazine. I originally liked the name ‘Haydonews’ however I believed it was a little too boring and confusing as there would only be one n. After some debate, I changed the name to ‘Haydon Times’ and believed the simplicity and straightforwardness of the name was suitable for the theme and genre of my magazine.  I also sketched out the main image and headlines I was going to incorporate on the front cover page. I kept the layout of my contents page simple and easy to read to attract the reader’s attention. I also made it visible that I was going to include two images within the page. After I was happy with my decisions I used a finer liner to outline the pencil markings. I found the draft designs to be very useful as they gave me a clear idea on the layout and the different features I was going to include when designing my magazine in Adobe InDesign