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Preliminarily Task Planning
This was the first stage of my preliminarily. I researched various school magazine front covers and finding out what features are included in all school magazines. I decided what I liked and dislike about each front cover and used it to help me plan my own magazine front cover. -
Magazine Front Cover Mock
This was the mock up for my school magazine. I used pages to create this. It was useful as I was able to work out exactly where I wanted everything positioned on my front cover and experiment with where each image/textbox was placed. -
Final Magazine (Prelim task)
This was the final version of my school magazine. I used Photoshop to construct, however looking back on it in comparison to my music magazine I can tell it is extremely messy and lacks the basic codes and conventions needed to create a successful magazine cover. Despite this I still feel it helped me as I started to gain research planning skills which came in very useful later on, -
Institutional Research
This task gave me knowledge into the actual businesses and institutions that make the magazines. I reviewed and researched which institutions made what magazines, when, where, at what cost and what the actual magazine is about. This helped me gain a crucial understanding of what it takes to successfully publish magazines. It also helped me to pinpoint which instution would be best for my magazine based on what they already publish. -
General Research
For a large period of time I researched many different music magazine of a genre that interested me. I analysed all the key features which appeared on every magazine, what I found appealling personally and started to build an idea of what I wanted my own magazine to look like. I looked back to my preliminary task and noted what wasn't effective and how to change that when coming to construct my music magazine. -
Audience Research
I learnt from doing this task, that the front covers of magazines need many features to appeal to all audiences. This will make a magazine successful and as long as it is well done and the content is good, it will sell well. I needed to featured at least some of these examples or variants of these examples in my magazine to make the cover look successful. -
Formatting Research
From doing this task, I discovered the general layout for a front cover, contents page and double page spread in the genre of music magazine I wanted to produce. It helped me to plan my own pages as I now had something to get me started and to look to for suggestions on what I was missing and what is not needed. Finally, this has helped me understand alignment when laying out a page. This made the general look of the page much more attractive. -
Thinking of a concept
This was probably the most useful task when it came to creating my magazine. I looked over all the research I had done into magazine, took inspiration and ideas from many different magazines to fashion the concepts for my magazine. I looked into the audience, the colour sceme, images, typography, fashion and representation. This research was far more extensive in comparison to the prelim task. -
Rate Card and Surveys
Over the course of my research I had did a few surveys to discover what the readers of magazines similar to my idea also enjoyed. I looked at the rate cards of Kerrang! and NME as was able to put together my own rate card featuring images of other intrests of my target audience as well as key statistics about them. This included sex percentages, employment, student, hobbies/interests, music interests and geographic. -
Article Draft
From this task I used my research into terminology and the style of articles used in music magazines of a similar genre to mine to create my own article for a double spread using the correct terminology, with quotes, musical references, humor whlist remaining informative. -
Costume Planning
From this task I learnt to find appropriate fashion to fit the genre of my magazine. I used realistic ideas which can be easily achieved in real life whilst staying suitable to the style in which I was aiming for. -
First Photoshoot
This photoshoot was shot in front of a greenscreen so any background could be used later on. However, these photos did not fit the style of my magazine after editing and did not make it onto my final front cover. I did use one in my contents page as a poster. -
First Front Cover
This was my first at a front cover however I later realized it was not effective or appropriate to fit the style of a rock magazine. The facial expression is incorrect when referring to the codes and conventions needed for a music magazine. I kept many of the ideas used in this front cover for my final piece however with a more appealing image with better positioning (head overlapping masthead). -
Second Photoshoot
This photoshoot was for my front cover. It was shot in front of a brick wall to give quite a plain background so the main focus would be on the actor. This worked effectively and the photos worked well in comparison to the original photoshoot -
Final Front Cover
This was my final front cover. I feel it is very effective, eye catching with a lot going out without being messy or cluttered. This is a huge change when looking back to my original front cover and my preliminary task. I would not have been able to create this without the extensive research and planning. I feel all my skills have improved throughout the course of making this -
Third Photoshoot
This photoshoot was taken for my double page and front cover. It was shot outside for natural lighting and most photos were taken from a high angle. -
Original Double Page Spread
This was my original double page, however much like my first front cover it was not at all like a double page you would see in a magazine such as Kerrang! I made the image grey scale at the beginning meaning I could not change it later on. This made problems automatically as the entire page lacked any colour apart from in the text. The text looked very plain and was too large. The positioning of the artist meant that he would get folded in half when the page was made into two. -
Fourth Photoshoot
This was the final photoshoot I did and was a re shoot for my double page as the photo I used was too dark However these photos were not particularly good quality so I ended up only using one in the bottom corner of my double page. I ended up using the same image as I did before and managed to make it brighter on Photoshop. -
Final Double Page Spread
The layout for my double page spread is far better than the layout of my preiminary task. The colours, fonts, size comparisons and all other aspects need to make a magazine have improved. -
Final Contents Page
This contents page was a great improvement to my preliminary task when looking at the photos layout and quality content. I feel that this could not have been achieved efficiently without the planning and research I had done prior to this. -
Final Product
This is my final front cover, contents page and double page spread. I am very pleased with the outcome of all three of these pages and feel I have learnt alot in the process of making it. Each page has been created using Photoshop and I have acquired many new techniques and abilities from extensively using this piece of software over the past few weeks.
