Music Magazine Evaluation.

For my music magazine's main musical theme and genre I decided to go with a sort of pop punky theme, a genre increasingly popular with teenagers today. I believed it would be easy to convey a pop punk/pop rock theme in my magazine and this therefore meant that the typical black/red/white format of rock magazines wouldn't do. So I instead settled on a blue, to really set it apart from other magazines, allowing it to catch the audiences eye.

Forms and conventions in magazines.

As mentioned, I decided to go with a colour scheme consisting of light blue back grounds and black writing to stand out, or alternatively a vice versa situation where blue writing is placed on a light black background, again to stand out on the page.I think this is in contrast to most magazines seen today that employ an almost cliché red/black/white colour scheme, like NME for example. I feel this is too easy to do, and therefore, I just wouldn't do it. Of course, it would be easy to create my magazine with a completely unconventional colour scheme, that unfortunately did not look like a music magazine, which is the very reason I incorpated a set of three music notes and a bar of muisc from a song too give it the music feeling the magazine needed, and also used pictures to convey this message, using photo's of guitars and singers. All this adds up to an unconventional style of magazine, but one that still looks like a music magazine.

House Style:

 Throught the making of my magazine I tried to maintain the same fonts for things that appear on more than one page, an example being the name of the magazine on the front cover, which is copied across to the contents page, keeping the notes and music bar, but adding "contents" onto the appropriate page, for obvious reasons. This creates a sense of symmetry in the magazine and makes it easier on the eye for the reader, who aren't faceed with reading a title in a hard to read font every other page, but instead reading the same font, with a different title. The font itself is a rather random font that could well be assosciated with the don't-care attitude of pop punk bands by being "scribbled", giving an almost messy look, which I believed was appropriate. I also thought it was important to keep the same colour scheme for every page for the same reason of not confusing the reader with an amalgamation of random colours.

I used a sort of "grid system" with my magazine, especially the contents page, although it's more of a system where the page is set into horizontal thirds, or so I see it. I have my contents as such down the left, as the typical person is known to read from left too right, so this is important.I then fill the space in the middle with an image of the front cover, and a note and picture of the "editor" of the magazine. Then the right hand side of the screen, last seen by the typical reader, is two stories that are in the magazine, leading the viewer to want to read more.

The images I used are meant to emulate photos I have seen before and drwn inspiration from, especially the front cover picture which particularly drew influence from a photo I saw that uses a similar pose. It conveys the carefree attitude of most pop punk bands today and does it quite well. Unfortunately I was not able to get any female influence in regards to photo's, and it would've been interesting to have a photo of a female band member, or even a full female band to go on my magazine,something I'd definitely change if I had chance. I do believe however that it does not make too major an impact on the magazine and believe it still has a pop pnk vibe to it as a whole.

I try to express an almost "excitable" feeling when it comes to writing on the front cover or contents page, using exclamation marks effectively to convey this. I beleive this makes the reader more excited as such too carry on reading the magazine, and this is important as the front cover is the first thing a potential buyer of the magazine will see. I also labelled it as essential, suggesting to the potential buyer that they need to read the magazine, as it is essential if they are interested in the genre it covers.

I used a specific font website for  my main fonts called dafont.com, which is an incredibly affluent user driven website of all types of different fonts, numbering over 10,000 in number. All fonts are created by users and this means there is absolutely no chance that a suitable font can't be found, as there is absolutely something there for everyone, and I found this website incredibly useful.



 Publishing my magazine:


I believe IPC would potentially publish my music magazine, although the colour scheme may well turn out to be too unconventional for such a big brand. However, IPC produce over 80 different media brands, some of which are indeed different too others, so I do beleive they woulld be more willing than others.And it would be ahuge success for a music magazine to be published by IPC, as the brands it already prints reach over two thirds of the UK's women, and almost 50% of men as well, so it would definitely be noticed. Other music brands printed by the company include the popular magazine NME, and also Uncut magazine, which also deals with music. The reason I believe IPC would be nterested

Audience:

Drawing from an early questionaire I created, I found that about 65% of my reader base would be male, with an age range between 17-19. Unfortunately, this questionaire was lost on an old computer, so I was unable to upload and have to instead remember my results. Obviously this is a problem and leads to unreliable data, and is again something I would change if I had time, and would be more careful about. My results did show however that 90% of readers would buy the music magazine purely because they enjoy the genre of pop punk, and believe that whilst unconventional, the colour scheme and house style of the magazine,a s a whole, does it a favour in setting it apart from the rest of magazines that stick to conventions, which is "boring and unimaginative".

 

 

Gathering information and use of technology:

 

Throughout the making of my magazine I have used digital cameras that connect to the pc via leads, computers themselves, programs such as editing software and a large amount of time on the internet, using such sites as search engines, or engine in my case as I only use Google. Font websites (such as Dafont.com previously mentioned) The use of the internet played a large part in forming my magazine, whether it be researching examples of music magazines or drawing influience from sites and magazines and photos and even articles, all helping me to complete my own magazine. Pictures I saw influenced the poses I "arranged" my actors into, and this helped create an authentic sense of pictures, since I am in no way a photographer, so can only learn and try to emulate professionals. Another incredibly crucial, if not essential piece of technology I used was image editing software, in particular Adoe Photoshop CS3 and CS4 (essentially the same). Without this programs multitude of features, a magazine like this would be incredibly hard to create. I did however have to learn how to use Photoshop as I was going along, so I'll be the first to saw that the cutting out of the actor pioctured on the front page is less than perfect. Unfortunately, there isn't much I can do as there is no way to undo the save. Hopefully though it still works as the main image of my front cover, and I do believe Photoshop became easier to use, which I used to my advantage when it came to editing my photo's and creating effects. Clearly then the most important piece of technology I used was the computer. There isn't one point in the course where I didn't have to use a computer, be it attaching a USB lead from the camera to the USB ports to upload my photo's, blogging my progress or researching, say, house styles of popular music magazines. There was no problem in this though as I am skilled with computers and actually found it a more enjoyable experience than using the typical pen and paper approach that other lessons seem to always take. This again worked to my advantage, especially when it comes to the aforementioned difficulties with Photoshop, as it meant that I was easily able to advance on the learning curve quickly.

College magazine/Music magazine comparison.

 

Finally we come to the comparison to my first two pages I did on my AS Media course, and this was my "college magazine" which actually just consists of the front cover and contents page of what would be my college magazine. I rushed these two pages as I was at that moment eager to start my music magazine, and I believe this shows quite clearly as there is no sense of order to the pages and no real house style either. I strongly believe taht my music magazine pages far outsrip these pages in terms of technical aspects and content, and this is definitely for the better. The lack of content and any form of structuring makes it appear to not even be a magazine, and is quite embarrassing actually. Hopefully this is in stark contrast too my main coursework Music Magazine Piece.