Evaluation of Magazine Front Cover

The

The brief was to use DTP and an image manipulation programme produce the front page, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine. All images and text used must be original and produced by use a minimum of four images.

I chose to stick to the conventions of a music magazine. This was because the audience would know what genre of magazine it was and the genre of music. They would know this because the images on a pop magazine are different to images on other genres of music and my own image connotates this. Using the conventions of a music magazine worked because from my audience feedback I found out that they liked how the magazine was set out and the use of a masthead, and a sell line and using the image as the background.

The conventions of the front cover of a music magazine that I used are a masthead, barcode, price, sell line, issue number, main image as the background, banner headline and sub headings. I didn’t use thumbnails of other articles because I thought that it would make my magazine cover look too full. If I was to do it again I would set the layout in a way that I could fit the thumbnails in as well. The masthead of my magazine is 'Stereo Love'. It is situated at the very top of the page and is white to contrast the background. I chose this name as it is appropriate to the genre of the magazine and will appeal to the target audience of 16-24. This is because when people are playing pop music they are usually listening to it on a stereo and they love that style of music. I think that the font of the masthead is also appropriate because the 'O' in stereo and love are disco balls. This is a connotation of pop music. I think that my masthead does stand out because it is white against a grey background but I think that it could have been bigger or set out in a way that would attract the audience more. My sell line is 'turn it up'. I chose this because I feel that it represents pop music. This is because it is regularly played in clubs where the music is played loud to get everyone dancing. I decided to have a banner headline because it will attract the audience because it stands out on the page. I highlighted the headline in purple to make it stand out against the rest of the page because it is an intense colour. The subheadings are the colour of her belt to fit in with the house style of the magazine. I have put them in a different font to the main headline to reinforce the main headline. I highlighted the 'exclusive first interview' and ' win V.I.P tickets for Katy Perry's Tour' in black because an exclusive interview interests people more because it is the only interview that they will be doing and V.I.P tickets are also very limited.

I have kept the same font that I used for my masthead and used it for my contents title. I think this is effective because it stands out and it shows continuity and creates a house style. I have also kept the colour scheme the same to carry on the continuity. I have put the titles of the articles in the beige colour and the quotes in black. This is because it catches the attention of the reader. I decided to put quotes under the titles of the articles because it intrigues the reader and gets them interested and they will then carry on reading the magazine. I decided to keep the headings of the feature articles and regular articles as feature and regular because it is simple and will not confuse anyone and is conventional. I have put the page numbers next to the article headings and on the pictures so that people know which page the article is on instead of them looking through the whole magazine to find the one article.

I have carried on using the same font that I have used for the front cover and the contents page. I think that the title of the article stands out as is take up about a third of the page. I did this to attract the attention of the audience. The outline of the article and the quote on the picture are the same colour as the writing on the front page and the contents page which shows continuity. I think that the font of the article could be hard to read but once it has been printed onto the size of a magazine it would be easier to read. I have put the questions in italic and the answers in a plain non italic font so that it is easy to distinguish which is the question and which is the answer. I put the article into columns and used a drop cap on the first letter because this is a convention of a double page spread. I also have page numbers on my page to reinforce the use of the contents page.

My magazine represents social groups because on the front page it shows that there are V.I.P tickets to see Katy Perry and on the contents page it tells you there is a mystery poster of a celebrity inside. This attracts students of the age range of 15-24 because they don’t usually have a lot of money because they are students. This means that they will buy the magazine so that they have a chance with winning V.I.P tickets because they can’t afford the buy the tickets. My target audience age range will be 15-24. I have directed my magazine at this age range because I think that people at this age tend to listen to the radio and watch the television a lot as they tend to be students and therefore would have an interest in pop music as it is played on a lot of radio and television channels. The S.E.G group I will be targeting is E, this is because students are in this group. Because I am targeting the audience of students I  decided that my magazine would cost £2.00 and it will be released bi-weekly. This is because my target audience will be students at the age of 15-24. Because they are either in full time education or if they do have a job they will be on minimum wage they will not have a lot of spare money to spend on luxuries like magazines. I will produce my magazine bi-weekly because then it will save the audience money because it will only be costing them £4 a month and they are more likely to spare £4 rather than £8. For the Value life styles(VALS) I will be targeting the groups that are outer- directed. This is because I want my magazine to be stereotypically represented and this group of people follow the stereotypes.

I would want my product to be distributed by Bauer Media. This is because they own most of the national radio stations such as Kiss, 4music and The Hits. These all target the same audience as mine and they play the music that my magazine is aimed at which is pop music. My magazine could then be advertised on the radio stations. Bauer Media produce Q, Mojo and Kerrang. These do not target the same audience as me so there is an opening for my magazine to target the market of pop music. It could be bad for them to distribute it because they do not have any other magazines that are similar to mine but on the other hand it is good because there is no other competition within Bauer Media.

My target audience age range was 15-24. I directed my magazine at this age range because I think that people at this age tend to listen to the radio and watch the television a lot as they tend to be students and therefore would have an interest in pop music as it is played on a lot of radio and television channels. The S.E.G group I targeted was E, this is because students are in this group. For the Value Lifestyles I targeted the groups that are outer- directed. This is because I wanted my magazine to be stereotypically represented and this group of people follow the stereotypes. I got ten people from my target audience to fill in a questionnaire that I had made and found out that most of them was attracted to the magazine but a few of them thought that the colour scheme needed to be a bit brighter to make it stand out more.

All the images in my magazine are original images that I have taken.

The image on the front cover is conventional photo to use as a main image. It is a mid-length shot of the artist featuring in the main article. She is staring at the camera to entice the audience. Her clothes match the pop music genre as they are neat and white to show purity and innocence but her eye makeup contrasts this as it is dark to show that she has a sexy side to her.

The top picture is the artist that is featuring in the main article. This picture is slightly larger and brighter than the rest of the pictures and is situated at the top to show that it is the artist that is going to appear in the main article. I think the pose that the artist is doing will entice the audience to read the article. She is looking at the camera and but has her body turned away and is looking over her shoulder which could show that she is hiding something and if you want to know the secret you have to read the rest of the article. The image contrasts the image on the front cover because she is in bright colours and has bright makeup. I did this to show that the artist has two sides to her- a sweet side and a secretive side. The second picture is of a band that are appearing in the magazine. Their outfits and pose are appropriate to the name of the band which is LOL on life. The girl on the lefts t-shirt has a love heart on it which shows she is loving life and there pose signs out LOL. Their faces also show that they are happy in life. The bottom photo was taken at a concert and is relevant to a regular article. This article is 60 seconds with a member from Mcfly and the photo is of Danny from Mcfly.

I think that the photo shows a different side to her to the front cover image and the contents page. The background of this photo is a home and it shows pyjamas which links in with the article as she says she likes to sit in her pyjamas like any other normal person which will make the audience relate to her and not just think she is a pop artist. I think the pose that the artist is doing is showing that she is happy with who she is and is willing to share with people about what she does at home and how she is just like everyone else. My audience feedback showed that this message was put across from the image.

I found using photoshop was hard. Even though I had done my preliminary task on photoshop I did not know how to do anything that I had planned to do so I had to change my ideas to fit in with what I could do on photoshop. I had problems with cutting out the background from my pictures which is why I decided to keep the picture as my background. I then had problems with downloading different fonts to use as my masthead but I overcame this problem. I also had problems finding effects to add to my images to make them stand out but I overcame this by testing different things until I found the effect I wanted. At first I also found it hard to upload the product to blogger until I found out that it needed to be saved as a jpeg. I used photoshop to make my magazine look professional. If I hand rendered it or used paint to make it then it would not look professional and would not attract my target audience. They would not pay £2 for a magazine that didn’t look good when they could buy other magazines that had been made professionally.

I think that my music magazine was better than my college magazine. I think that the images were more suitable as they fitted the conventions of a music magazine and I had more of a range of photos to use on my magazine as I took lots of photos in different outfits, poses and shots. I also think that my research was in more detail than the preliminary task which gave me more ideas for my music magazine. I took some ideas from my college magazine like outlining the feature headings in different colours and used it for my house style of my music magazine. I did more planning for my music magazine as I used polls to ask my target audience questions, brainstormed ideas for each page, did mock up drafts using images of celebrities to help me gain an idea of poses that my model should use and did more drafts of each page. Because I had used photoshop on my preliminary task I knew the basics about photoshop and was able to develop my skills on my music magazine which meant the final outcome of my music magazine looked more professional.