Changes!

For my front cover, I have decided to make a few quick changes to make it look more like a professional magazine Here you can see the changes that have been made. I changed the name of the artist to something that sounded more media related and made it shorter. Short names stand out more as there is less syllables in them and people can remember them. I also made the font bigger and took away some of the writing to keep it short and sweet. i moved the text at the top below with the rest of the text because it was over lapping the main image. Finally, i also twisted the "100 albums reviewed" box at an angle to make it look more interesting.

And finally

This is my contents page i create using photoshop. I decided to go with the brown, grey black and white colour scheme as i think this is indie and modern. Below you can see my final version of the contents page for G magazine!

I saw on the front cover of a Q magazine a little box which says 100 albums reviewed and thought this would be a nice touch for my magazine front cover. Below you can see Q magazines version and my own replicated version.

                                                              
                                          

My Logo

I created this logo in Photoshop and was mainly influenced by Q magazine. I think the whole one word logo works really ell and can be easily remembered seeing as theres no words to try and remember. This is my final logo design.

Lesson 4

During this lesson i started my double page spread and finished my second draft of my front cover. This didn't take me too long seeing as i came in during the half term for a few hours to get the first draft finished. then i managed to get my second draft finished. Finally, the next stage now would be to start my contents page and get a few drafts posted on my blog to see which one works best.

Double page spread

The next thing i had to create was a double page spread for my music magazine. Below you can see my first draft with no images. However I have blue boxes to show where I could place my images.

This is my second draft but I think personally I may have to change all of the font to white and not half black half white. This is going to be my final front cover as I like this design rather than plain white.

This is my first draft of my front cover. The things that I would change would maybe make the main coverline bigger and stand out more. Then I would make the two below cover lines stand out more but reduce them in size. I would also make the top right corner magazine name and barcode smaller and make the image more right aligned. Above you can see the changes.

Audience within a magazine

Audience

Three trends in news magazine circulation and readership stand out.

First, readership surveys indicate that the audience for news magazines is holding steady, while the audience for pop culture, entertainment and lifestyle magazines is growing. This fits with the trends in ad pages and revenues and suggests one of two things: Either the market for news magazines is more or less at its capacity or the genre needs to be reinvented.

Second, despite changes in content designed to grab younger readers, the audience for news magazines is aging - more than for most other magazine genres. News magazine readers are also more affluent than magazine readers overall, but that is not a big consolation financially. Advertisers are often looking for youth more than money, particularly in general interest magazines like the news weeklies.

Third, while the big three news magazines are finding it hard to increase their circulation, a few smaller circulation books that focus on news and public affairs have found steady growth over the past 15 years. This may suggest that the genre is ripe for change and indeed that the news magazine audience, or at least part of it, is looking for a new approach.

Who is Gaining and Who is Not

Over the past 10 years, there has been a clear division among magazine genres - those that are rising and those that are sitting still. Readership figures from Mediamark Research, the leading U.S. provider of syndicated consumer magazine audience data, indicate that since 1995 the entertainment and pop culture genre has gained popularity.¹ Interest in the news and business genres has remained flat.

Both news and entertainment magazines trended down in readership from 1995 until 2000. Then both categories began to rise again. But the increase in entertainment magazines was much more substantial, increasing 14 percent from 2000 to 2003.²News rose only 9 percent in the same period.³

Business magazines followed an opposite course. These magazines grew in readership from 1995, peaked in 2000 and then began to fall off.

Part of this is explained by the dying off of some magazines that were riding the success of the stock market and the technology boom. But other losses may have more to do with the fact that, when the market dipped, people stopped looking at their copies of Forbes and Fortune. For many readers, no news on their 401(k) was better than the bad news.

The figures also may suggest some shifting going on from genre to genre. Readers have only a certain amount of time to devote to magazines. If that time is not going to one genre, it's going to another. News and entertainment benefited from readers turning away from business publications.

But the uptick in entertainment readership is too sharp to be the result of falling business readership alone. It also follows logically another basic theory about media. If more of the media agenda is focused on lifestyle and entertainment, it increases interest in those areas. The media is both reflecting and reinforcing a broader cultural shift toward celebrity, entertainment and infotainment.

Finally, it is important you understand who your audience are and who is going to gain from reading your magazine before you even think about creating a new magazine.

Magazine Analysis

Analysis of two music magazine covers

NME

Here you can see NME magazine with Brendon Flowers on the front cover posing with attitude. Mainly the middle picture of him shows slight attitude, the other two are summery and bright seeing as he’s wearing shades and a t shirt. Finally this magazine is indie/rock and is perfect to base my own magazine around.

VIBE

Compared to the magazine above, this magazine shows real attitude, more so than the above NME magazine. You can obviously see this in several ways. The fact the biggest mainstream rapper and singer Eminem is on the front cover says it all really. Arms crossed, no smile and a glare staring directly at the camera face on shows a mean attitude. Also the red and black masthead is almost like blood dripping down from a black rotten corpse. Finally, the tattoos on his arms indicate he is a bit of a gangster and a rebel. This magazine is perfect for basing my own magazine around due to these reasons. 

Friendly Fires - Skeleton Boy

The Kooks - Naive

Typical indie band called The Kooks.

Diary blog – Lesson 3

In today’s lesson I have researched into some magazine photos and general band photography using Google images to try and get an idea of the types of images I could use. I came to the conclusion that I want an aspect of attitude for my magazine front cover. I mainly looked at NME Magazine and Q magazine for this research. I looked at the bands U2 and Oasis to help me figure out what posture and pose I want my friends to pose as. Attitude seems to be a great idea. I would mainly want them to pose with no smile, maybe have a guitar in there hands and trendy topman styled clothing. Most of my friends dress indie so this wont be too hard to conduct. I have a gig on the 24^th of January 2011 where I can grab some live band images and useful photography. Finally, I will need to take my photography by the end of the month and get my front cover finished and published. 

Student Magazine reflection.

My student magazine was based on a typical college/uni magazine and was really simple to create. I used Photoshop to develop a final outcome, which were a front cover and a contents page.

I think my magazine as a whole was a success but I could have maybe improved on certain areas such as:

·      Maybe choose a different colour scheme, like use better colours as I think mine are too bold and simple.

·      Choose different text for the contents page

·      The affect of my picture could have been better. I should have used some other image instead of the one I chose. I wasn’t too fond of the image I used.

The things I liked about my magazine were the following:

·      I liked the colour scheme although I thought it was simple, it fitted in well with the college ethos and colour scheme of bright blue and green.

·      I also liked the layout of the contents page as its more interesting than having a boring and simple layout.

Finally, as a whole. I would safely say that my magazine was a great success. The changes I would make aren’t drastic but maybe I could use these ideas for the music magazine and think more in depth about the layout, colours and fonts.

This is a front cover of NME magazine showing the return of the band Pulp. It is a typical indie rock magazine which has attitude aspects to it. For example, the way he is posing with his upper lip open as if he is looking for a fight and also the way his scruffy clothes are open shirt and sleeves. He is also sticking two fingers up which suggests attitude. Two fingers up come from the English war against the french hundreds of years ago when the english would shoot the fingers off enemy soldiers and then show them the two finger pose to suggest ''look we still have our fingers''. Finally, i would like to think my magazine will look something similar to this, one person posing with attitude.

Lesson 2

Today we researched into different music magazines and tried to find the magazine names that fit the genre of our own magazine. My genre is indie rock and roll so NME and Q proved to be the best for this. I also finished my magazine proposal and any other outstanding work.

Introduction

Welcome to my music magazine blogspot. I have created this blog to make life easier for myself and to have all my work on one page for everyone to see and share with there friends. Hopefully you will be influenced by my works..... I have to create a front cover, back cover and a double page spread as well as a contents page for my own magazine design based the indie/alternative genre of music, kind of like NME magazine, this will most certainly be my influence.

Music magazine genres and sub genres

This is my music genre list that i created in microsoft word. This was completed in my second lesson last year. I have chosen the indie/alternitave genre for my magazine as a whole. I have decided this simply because it is my favorite genre and I dress like an indie/alternative person through influence of celebrities.

MUSIC MAGAZINE