Evaluation

For my project I had to create a music magazine based on a genre of my choice. But before I did that I had to produce a quick front cover for a college magazine, this would help me get used to the tools that I would need to use for my music magazine. I felt that I spent too much time on the college magazine’s logo that I didn’t have enough time to make the rest of the cover look good. I am disappointed with the outcome, however it has taught me not to spend to long on one section.

The music genre I decided to focus on was heavy rock and heavy metal as I like that type of music. The first thing I had to do was analysis 2 existing magazine covers of magazines that deal with the same genre I have chosen. I also had to analysis one contents page and one double page spread. The first cover I analysed was Kerrang! this is very much like the style I wanted to have, therefore most of my inspiration came from them. I also analysed their contents page and one of their double page spreads. I looked at NME’s front cover too. From this research, it gave me ideas on what style and features my magazine will include, I created a flat plan detailing how my magazine will look and what the layout will be like. Now it was time to get to work.

I started off by creating the front cover, I did spend a long time on creating the logo, however because we had more time this time round it didn’t effect my time management too much. I wanted the font for my logo to be a typical distorted/eroded style. I went on www.dafont.com and got the “The Great Thunder” font, this was near enough what I was looking for. I put in the common features such as barcode, price, issue number; features inside etc then went about getting a picture. For our project we weren’t allowed to get a picture from the internet, we had to take the pictures ourselves. I managed to take a photo of a street performer in Brighton; I edited it in Photoshop to remove the background then put him on the cover and created a logo for him. The front cover did take me the longest out of all the tasks in this project, however I am pleased with the outcome.

Next I had to do a contents page, I created a basic one but it had no pictures. Since I was running out of time when I made the contents page, I decided to stick a picture on which I had taken a long while ago (as you will see it’s a picture of me which was taken using my phone then edited). This picture doesn’t really have any point unfortunately, but I thought it added a bit of unique style to the otherwise bland contents page. If I had more time I would have put thumbnails on each of lines and chose a better picture for the background.

The double page spread was the hardest to do because it was the most complex to layout, it needed more pictures and I had to write an article for it. I decided to create a quick layout using the shape tool and the line tool, then I went on to write the article. The article was hard because I wasn’t sure what to write about, when I did know though, I realised I had to write it in the style of the magazine. Since mine was going to be like Kerrang!, it needed to be in slang and have swearing in (or at least sarcasm). I did my best and I’m satisfied with the article. I put it into my double page spread (I had to adjust it into the columns which were a pain). Now all I had to do was get some pictures, I decided to use pictures stored on my computer of me and my friends (I don’t know why I didn’t think of that in the first place!), luckily there were some half decent ones so I used them. I am quite happy with the turn out of this double page spread.

Before I started creating my music magazine, I had to decide whom my target audience was going to be so that I knew what I should put in my magazine. I decided that gender and nationality wouldn’t matter as it would be aimed at both genders and anyone in the world, but the age range I chose was mid teens to young adults (16 – 25). I made sure to include the relevant artists, colours and features of a typical rock/metal magazine but changed the overall style so that it was unique and hopefully more appealing then any other similar magazines on the market. I made sure that it fitted in with the social groups of my audience (C1 – E).
I feel that I have progressed a lot since the preliminary task, I managed my time better and my skills with InDesign have drastically improved. I would love to do this again (but with no deadlines please!!).