Thursday, March 11, 2010
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Music magazine front cover
This is the front cover for my comedy/parody music magazine, 'BBC's LMAO' .
I have created my own masthead design and logo which i think compliment well with the genre of music magazine i have chosen. I have made sure to follow standard conventions, such as the dateline, edition number, cover price, main headline, bar code and bleeding of image. These conventions helped me to improve my quality of design skills. Therefore i feel that i have developed my skills immensely from the preliminary task and feel confident that my magazine looks somewhat similar to a normal magazine that is on the market.
The main area of design i had least looked forward was the photography element as i feel that i cannot take an interest into this area of the work. However, i am extremely pleased with the image i have taken as it, in my opinion, looks genuine and has many good qualities like the bleeding of the image frame and distance from camera which i had varied in the image. This with some photoshop editing helped make my magazine look genuine and follow the conventions i had set in my own design, mainly regarding colour scheme.
I think that, in terms of the text, i have effectively used media skills to attract the attention to the most important elements of my cover. My masthead looks effective on my magazine as a pulling feature and then the rotation of my headline makes it a secondary attraction that helps to immediately engage my audience and give them instant knowledge about the band on the front cover, which is important to having a new and unique sellling point that makes my magazine a realistic product
music magazine contents page
My contents page was designed from a template of my front cover. I used my questionnaire to find out what the contents should include and divided them up into the regulars and special features. In order to develop my house-style I titled these sections with a relevant header, "The Stand Up" and "Impromptu". I think these are good choices for my target audience. I have used the front cover design to develop this page as it helps me create a 'house-style' that the audience can recognise from page to page.
I used a small range of shot types with long shots and close ups being the main ones. This breaks up my design so it does not look to robotic in its construction. This helps make the page look more assymetrically natural rather mechanically symmetrical.
Because i chose a musical comedy genre i was able to choose specific lexis and registers to adapt my language to fit the purpose of the page. This is evident in the captions for each of the individual sections of the contents.
Double page spread
This is the final copy of my double page spread. This article features an inside look into the birth of a new fictional musical genre that the band created. In order to make this more genuine i have included comments from one of the members of this fictional band also.
In constructing this piece of journalism i have used specific guidelines to make sure the articles are even sized over the left 50% of the page. I have also made sure that the gutters between collumns are visible and even too. The article itself has some standard magazine article conventions included, such as the drop-caps and the pull quotes. As part of my light-hearted design work i have tried to break some conventions, for instance, i have unusually placed the page numbers on the inside of the pages, towards the stapling point as this will be unique to my magazine and unconventional but still serve its purpose accurately. i realised that this convention is very common so i made the page numbers more visible in order to make it visible to the audience.
I took some inspiration from the kerrang magazine double page spread as it similarly kept its article on one side, and seperated the artist and other graphological elements to the other. This helps divide the page and simplify the article for the reader as it will be covered or hidden between masses of imagery. i like the way the use of my colour scheme went well together in this arrangement and i think i have maintained visual interest throughout the whole two pages by showing a variation in font colour and background gradient, again adding to the sense of a house-style