Throughout my research, I began to notice that most music magazines are specific to a particular

genre of music and I found it very hard to find a magazine that catered for purely chart/pop music for teenagers. For example, Mojo magazine features a lot of different artists but it’s rare that chart music will be covered. Also Kerrang magazine is a purely rock magazine that only appeals to people who like rock music. I wanted to make my magazine appeal to as many people as possible and I thought the easiest way to do this was to base it on current, pop music. This meant that the target audience for my magazine would most likely be teenagers. I tried to appeal to this target market by featuring a young, up and coming star on the cover.

I wanted to have a similar target audience for my college magazine, obviously, with it being a college magazine I want it to appeal to students at college and prospective students which means they will predominately be teenagers. I tried to create a young looking magazine with a fashion feel so that it appeals more to the fashionable teenage market.

Despite these differences, I used inspiration from NME magazine for the contents page of my music magazine – I liked the clean, simple layout and the very simple colour scheme. Also I took inspiration from New magazine’s contents page for my college magazine – I thought that it had a vibrant feel that would appeal to teenagers.

My music magazine in particular, I feel definitely represents teenagers and possibly people in their 20s. The music featured is very new and most of it is in the charts. This target audience was my intention when planning the music magazine. Although I wanted to make my music magazine appeal to as many people as possible, I think that it may only appeal to people who like chart/pop music. However, I don’t think this is such a bad thing because there is not many magazines on the market that cater for this group of people.

The design of the magazine is quite bold overall, I decided to use colours that would attract attention such as bright greens and blues along with darker background colours. I think this, again represents the audience that I was aiming for, I find that bold, bright colours appeal to younger generations as opposed to people over 40 for example.

I tried to keep the design gender neutral so that it could appeal to as many people as possible, I made a point of doing this after my college magazine turned out to look very much like a women’s fashion magazine. Although I thought that the college magazine would appeal to teenagers, I thought that it might not represent the teenage market as a whole.

I tried various colour schemes for the cover of my music

magazine but I eventually decided that green and sky blue was

the combination that I liked most, I thought that the blue and

green stood out well on the background and the overall cover

looked bold and exciting.

As I’ve made magazines for this coursework, the media institution that would distribute my

product is the print industry. The magazine would need to be printed to be sold in shops and supermarkets all over the country so I would need to print the magazine on a large scale if it was to be sold in the real world.

I would use advertisements in other established magazines and newspapers to promote my product which would also be involved in the printing industry.

I planned my magazines to be aimed at teenagers. The college magazine is aimed at teenagers attending college and looking to start studying at college. The magazine appeals

to them because of it’s news and offers relating to college life.The music magazine, similarly is aimed at teenagers, I created a wide target audience by appealing to both male and female, and by featuring music that is widely recognised and listened to. I featured young musicians and used images and a design that I think would appeal to people of this age group. I wanted the magazine to be cheap so it is accessible to

most people as a lot of teenagers often don’t have a lot of money to spend on luxuries like magazines.

The colour scheme on my double page spread, I think,

is particularly striking. I first decided on which image I

wanted to use for my double page spread, then I used

colours that would match/compliment the image. As

you can see I used a faded image background as I

think it gives the page more depth and I thought that

the white text stood out well against this dark

background. The quote text and the title for the page

matched the colour of the lighting in the image which

helped the whole article to tie in together. I then based

the rest of the magazine around this colour scheme as

you can see on the contents and front cover of the

music magazine.

In my college magazine and especially the music magazine, I used informal language throughout that teenagers

would relate to. The colour scheme of the music magazine is very bold which would attract attention on the newsstand of a shop.

My colour scheme

helped in attracting the

audience in more ways

too, I used a black and

white image on the cover

so that there were no

distracting colours – this

helped the parts of the

front cover of my music

magazine that were

actually in colour stand

out even more. I think

that the masthead, the

blue sell lines at the

‘Reading and Leeds...’

sell line stand out

extremely well against the

black and white colours

surrounding them. The

same idea works on the

double page of the music

magazine and the cover

of the college magazine.

Most of the colours on this page are pink, blue or purple. I used

white writing to make the coloured text stand out above the rest.

Throughout this process, I have learnt that it is possible to create

professional looking products using basic, everyday software such as

Microsoft Publisher. However, I combined Microsoft Publisher with

Adobe Photoshop to edit my images and give them a more

professional look than I could have achieved in Microsoft Paint for

example.

I also learnt how to design a magazine layout. Reflecting on the

college magazine and the music magazine that I’ve created, I think

the music magazine looks better. When I first made a college

magazine, I used very large text on the cover and found it hard to find

a colour that matched the background of my mock college

magazine. I worked out which fonts looked best and especially which

colours work well together – I found that bright colours on a dark

background work very well.

MOCK college magazine

My final college and music magazines featured images

that had very simple backgrounds, this directed

the viewers attention to the things on the page that I wanted them to look at.

Also, it made it much easier to find colours of font that

worked well with the background.

When making my mock college magazine, I used a detailed main image and I had to use an outline for some of the text to make it stand out from the image. I think this looked unprofessional and I learnt from this when making the next two front covers.

The bright light here distracts the reader from the information and main image on the page.

I think that the text for some of the sell lines on this page are too big, I could have fit much more text onto the cover.

I edited the background on the main image for my music magazine so that it didn’t distract the reader and left a plain background for the text that I wanted to add.

I made the font much smaller on this magazine cover, contents and double page spread I printed samples of font out to see if it would be large enough to read. I even reduced the size of some of the font on my double page spread down to 10pt. This meant that I could fit more information onto the page.

I learnt that I could adjust the character spacing of text on Microsoft Publisher, this helped me when creating my music magazine cover, I like the way that the letters in ‘SPARK’ are spaced out.

I think that the image worked well in black and white. I used the Photoshop Desaturate option to create this effect.

On all of my covers, I edited the masthead and the main image together in Photoshop so that part of the image overlapped the masthead. I thought this made the magazine look more professional.

I am pleased with both my preliminary task and the full product, however, I think that after completing the college magazine I was able to design and make the music magazine with less research because of the knowledge I’d previously gained.

I think out of everything, I’ve learnt about the layout of a magazine most. I created a few different designs for the college magazine before I was satisfied with the result. I used existing magazine research to see how their content is arranged on the page. I found that a lot of the text in a magazine is quite small. The first design I created of the college magazine didn’t look as professional as it could have in my opinion and I rectified this in the college and music magazines by using smaller font.

FRONT COVER

I liked the large sell line at the bottom of the page in the final college magazine – I decided to keep this idea when moving onto the music magazine.

FRONT COVER

I’ve learnt from designing my initial college magazine cover that it is much easier and clearer for the reader if you have a plain background image. It’s easier to find a text colour that will work with the image and there is often more space on the page to fit information.

This cover of Q for example seems quite cluttered even though it doesn’t feature a huge amount of text. The heavily detailed background makes it harder to read the text and distracts me from the information that is being displayed.

I’ve found that by using three key colours, the magazine can look more eye catching and visually appealing. I kept this idea throughout making my music magazine. As you can see, the cover of my music magazine features black, green and blue mainly.

CONTENTS PAGE

Each time that I designed a new contents page, I learnt that there needed to be more information on the page and less blank space. You can see the difference between my first contents page (bottom left) and my final contents page (bottom right). The area is filled up more on the music magazine contents page whereas the two college magazine pages have more empty space. I realised that a long block of text wasn’t appealing to the reader after getting feedback on my contents page, so when I created the music magazine I decided to split the contents into sections with images relating to articled and headings above articles so that readers would be able to find what they’re looking for easily.

From my preliminary task to the main task, I learnt that timing and organisation was imperative to meeting a deadline. For my music magazine, I took the photos right at the beginning of the project so that I could then decide on colour schemes and where the pictures would be placed in the magazine. Whereas in the college magazine, I designed layouts before I took the final cover image which then meant that I had to change the colour scheme and layout to suit the new image.

Now that I’ve completed my music magazine, I’ve realised that I’ve stuck to my original ideas and haven’t changed a lot as I went along. I took the photos that I wanted to feature on the magazine right at the beginning of the project at a music festival so I based my ideas around the images.My double page spread changed slightly from my initial intentions however, I was originally planning on having a full page image on the right hand side of the double page spread and a block of text on the left. After doing an interview with an artist I found that I had an awful lot of text to fit onto the page so I had to reduce the size of the main image on this page and make the text quite small in order to fit it on. However, I’m pleased with the result, I think that the font is still large enough to read and I particularly like the quote in the middle of the page.I used more images on my contents page than I originally planned, as I was making the contents page I liked the design more every time I added a new image, so I decided to make the page as visual as possible and add quite a few images.I’m very pleased with the magazine as a whole, it looks exactly as I’d imagined.