Making the Contents

To make the contents page the first thing I did was to put the logo in the top right hand corner, which stands out but isn't in the way.

Which looked like this after I had added the text;



I stayed with my black, blue and white colour scheme, I had the title "Contents" at the top left to be the same size as the logo so it was aligned. To keep my colour scheme I decided to have a black background with white titles and page numbers with the features names in blue so the writing was equally white and blue.

The next thing I did was to get 2 pictures in, these were one of Billy Lunn and one of Hard-Fi, this is because those are to be my magazines 2 main features so they were both pictured on my contents page.

With the pictures i decided to use the "Cookie Cutter Tool" this cuts out some of a picture, i chose to cut out the outline of the picture to give it a more rough look to it, I used the same effect on both pictures and overlapped them, this gave the contents a more messy look to it but it stayed simple.


The last thing I did with the contents was to add the page number, the contents would page 1. I did this by making a small blue box (the same shade of blue as the writing) and then adding a black page number into it.

Making The Front Cover

To make my front cover I used a photo of Hard-Fi because they are going to be my main feature for this issue. To do this I took the most eye-catching photo i had and cropped it first to make it fit onto an A4 piece of paper.


This is the cropped version of;






This gives me the background for my front cover, i am using one photo on the front cover because that is what I have found to be the "norm" for most music magazines after doing my research. Once i got this photo I looked at the different colour effects that I could use, I decided to enhance the colour more to make the picture bolder and more colourful, this did not make it any less defined just brighter, which I feel made it more eye-catching.


I had not sorted out a logo or name for my magazine once I had this photo, so I made that my priority, I thought of many things that were relevant to music to play around with the words, such as;

CD, Tape, Radio, Sound, Speaker, Instrument, Record, Gig, Concert, Venue

After playing around with these words I came to my final choice of having "Broken Record" as my name.

I then needed a logo, I deiced to use Paint on the computer to design one, My first idea was to have a large B and a large R with the words after each other, but after trying this it took up a lot of room and didn't look very eye-catching. I then had the idea to have a big B and R with "Broken Record" underneath it, I couldn't manage to tilt writing on Paint so i wrote "Broken Record" on when editing the front cover on PhotoShop

My final logo is;

I saw on different magazines I had bought there was writing over the pictures in different colours, I didn't like the idea of having different colours because I am sure i want Black Blue and White as my colour scheme, I then had the idea of a slanted black text box and writing for the features. this worker very well. I then added a black circle at the end of it to round off the edge of the box, I feel that this gives it a different effect which makes the cover look less solid, it also works well with the wire and microphone rounded at the same angles.

To include other features in the magazine I put a black box at the bottom left of the front cover to include smaller features such as; An album review, Bands to reform in 2009 and The Weird and The Wonderful.

To make my bar code I looked up pictures of bar codes on Google, took notes about how they were laid out, the size of the bars and where abouts the numbers are and how many there are. I then designed my own bar code on Paint.

I also added the details of the issue into a slated black box at the bottom right hand side. This includes the issue number, the price and the date of release.

The final outcome;

Photos

I decided to use some photos that I had already from a concert I went to in December 2007 as I knew I had some good photos that can be used. They are from a Hard-Fi concert at Wembely. Some of the best photos that I am going to use are.

I feel that this is a very good photo with good lighting, visibility and positions. Because the photo is landscape I would have to crop the photo to be on the front cover.

I feel this photo is good because it is easy to crop, this is because both of the band members featured in this photo are in the middle and there is nothing in the way of the photo, the lighting is also fairly good.

I think this photo is good enough to use because it has very different lighting to many of my other photos, it also has a clear visibility and focused on the lead singer.

I think this photo is good because it features 3 members of the band all in the central position. It is also easy to crop again because they are all in the middle of the shot.

I feel this photo is good because the lead singer has a close up with a good pose, although another band member is behind him i feel i could use this photo in my magazine.

This photo is good because the confetti is being sprayed upwards at the end of the concert as well steam, this gives a great view as an action shot, the shot has a great visibility as well.

This photo was taken at a local gig where the lead singer of The Subways (Billy Lunn) was doing an acoustic performance at a local venue, this shot gives a great action shot close-up of him playing. The lighting could defiantly be better but i don't think it makes that much difference if I can edit it well enough to make it less noticeable.

Planning

On 6th March we were told how to plan and take our photos for our magazine, we got basic ideas and first initial thoughts on what we could include and how to take the photos and edit them. we got about 10 minutes at the end of the lesson to plan the layout and pictures.

I bought 2 magazines, ( One Q and one NME ) to help get ideas for content and how to layout my front cover. My magazine i had already decided was going to have a genre of Alternative Rock/Indie. which meant that NME and Q were probably the 2 nearest magazines feature-wise to what I wanted my magazine to be.

I looked at the double page spreads that these 2 magazines had and any older magazines I had from previous months and issues, a lot of the double pages had interviews or reviews. this is when i decided that i would have a review as one of my main features.

I wanted to make my magazine different from any other big magazines out at the moment so I decided to have as my main A3 spread the story of a band/artist.

The first thing i had to decide for my magazine in my mind was the colour scheme, i chose to have black and blue mainly with some white.

before starting the first thing which would be the front cover I had to know what a good front cover looks like so I went through any magazines I had at home which mostly included NME and Q ( I also went back over the presentation I did on Q magazine because i knew I included many images of Q's front covers on it) and got a good idea what I wanted to include which was one big image that was applied as the background and text around the top bottom and sides wit the image being the central idea. This meant I had to have a very good image which stood out.

Presentation

On 5th March we made a presentation on a music magazine, we had to do it on a magazine that we had not previously looked at. I decided to do it on Q, we had 2 hours to do this and present facts and figures on a PowerPoint presentation. this was a helpful task because we could see what we had to include and think about when making our magazine cover, contents and double sheet.

Essay

On 3rd March we had to do an essay in the lesson on the ways in which magazines attract their audiences online and on the print versions, including things such as keeping reader loyalty and free gifts and the differences between both. this is why the homework we had to do before was important.

I wrote about the layout, the free gifts that are given away both online and on print, how the website can be updated much more often than the print and how the genre of music is kept consistent every week to keep people buying it every week and keeping the loyalty of the customers.

Music Magazine Homework.

I decided to compare the versions of NME print and online.

One of the biggest differences between the print and online on first impressions was the lack of colour on the online version, the print version is very colourful with many coloured backgrounds. on the website there is a simple white background. The online version has much more content because it has pretty much unlimited space to put features in, a magazine only has a set amount of pages to work with and also have to include adverts to make the money in those pages as well so there's much more content online.

The print versions include posters with every issue. which the online version obviously can't include unless you take a picture they on there and print it out. they do include however pictures big enough to be a desktop background on most computers. these are all free gifts, other free gifts are only available by buying the print issue, like the issue i was looking at gave away a free CD and a Kings Of Leon poster.

Magazine analysis

On Friday 27th February we had more time to look at music magazines. I chose to look more at NME and at kerrang because i hadn't looked at that yet, both magazines had very similar contents but with different genres and styles of music.

We were given homework on comparing the print version and the online version.

Contents Page

On Thursday 26th February we had to do the 2nd part of the preliminary task, we had to make the contents page for our magazine. We had our double lesson to do it in the computer room. I made sure i had a good house style with the same colour background and the same font. this is important to make it look as realistic as any other magazine.

this is my final product.

After we had finished the contents page we had some time to look at some different music magazines. there was a selection of NME, Kerrang and Top of the Pops for us to look at. we had about 30 minutes to look at them for.