Music Magazine Evaluation

My media product represents a social group that enjoy or appreciate R&B or Soul music. Although, mainly teens and young adults listen to R&B whereas Souls main group would be older adults because that type of music was popular 20 or 30 years ago and R&B is now the popular genre of music in the younger generation. Also, on the front cover of my media product there are names of artists that people who listen to R&B and Soul will know and can relate to the magazine in that sense.


Due to soul not being very popular with younger generations and modern R&B not being to popular with older generations, the media institute that would most likely distribute my media product would be MTV because they have many different types of media products such as TV channels and magazines and are an extremely popular music institute world wide. MTV also have channels such as MTV base that play R&B music which is also the genre of my magazine so it would be more likely for MTV to distribute my media product.




The target audience for my media product would be for people of all ages who listen to R&B and Soul music because that is what my media product is specialised in.



To attract my audience I had to relate the content of my magazine to R&B and Soul as those are the people I want to be reading my magazine.

When I look back at my preliminary task, I prefer the music magazine as I feel that I have progressed from the school magazine but not by any substantial amount. I know this is due to the fact I'm not very good at planning and therefore I went straight into it at the last minute and since I had to time to think about any other designs or ideas, I had to settle with the one I have now otherwise I would've had nothing.

The Double Page Spread

This is my double page spread. I personally am happy

with this because I feel it looks quite realistic. I used

the same font and text colour on the first page as the

front cover, this was because I wanted to keep

it looking realistic. Also, due to my research on soul

R&B magazines, I found doing this is quite common

and I would think they do this because of the

simplicity. Furthermore, after viewing some other

peoples magazines i thought that they all looked to

similar and street, whereas mine is more unique

and I tried to avoid an urban style.

Final Contents Page

This is my final contents page. I have to say from looking at my front cover
that this wasn't exactly up to scratch. I couldn't really figure out a design I liked or thought looked awful so i ran out of time and had to make do with
this. While I like the colour scheme, I'm not fond of the gradient used. I do believe I've gained a bit of knowledge on how to design these magazines but to any great amount. The photo used is one of my brother who is looking away from the camera and holding his head in his hand. This pose is showing that he is thinking of something which might be to do with something on the contents page.

Finished Front Cover

Finally I Finished My Front Cover And This Is How It Looks.

On my previous posts you can see the idea i had in mind of how my front cover may look. However, i realised those ideas were not very good and i didn't put enough thought into them. So, i started again and this is now how its looks, and in my eyes it looks a lot better.

I also found a new text which i thought would work well and make my brother name stand out more "METIN". I made is capitals and made it the large to stress that he is the main focus of the magazine and the front cover. I also kept to a colour code of white and yellow which i think is easy to read and i also spaced the heading out well so they argent squashed together which would make
it hard to read.

I didn't want to pack tons of headings, subheadings and other things
on the front cover because i learned from my research that packing the page with too much
makes it horrible to read. I also added a strap line under my magazines name which says
"The Number One Soul/ R&B Magazine". This basically speaks for its self and its the best Soul/R&B magazine on the market. I felt doing that made the magazine look more realistic.

Step 5 & 6

Step 5. Background Added

Step 6. Text Added & Barcode Added

The background wasn't created my me and i found it on a Google image search. I lack the the skill to create a good background so i thought this would make it looker better anyway. The stars reinforces that fact the person on the cover is a star and the colours are easy on the eye and clam which i think is important if i am to make a soul and R&B magazine. Now its looking good and i added a bar code to add to the realism effect and i also added some text of my brother, but i wasn't happy with it as i think it took away
the sense of realism so i worked hard at home and finished it off with better fonts and colours.

Step 4

4. Added Star Plus The Black Block At The Bottom Will Be Used For More
Text & Design

I still felt it didn't look good enough to start messing around with the background and start typing stories on the front page. So, i added a start in between the words soul and city just to get a more authentic look to the front cover and i also added at the bottom the black overlay which would contain more once i reached that part. I felt that this was now starting to look like a good piece of work and at this moment i was satisfied.

Step 2 & 3

2.Photo Plus Text Downloaded from Dafont
3. Text With Black & White Gradient

I went onto the website Dafont.com to find some fonts i could experiment with my the one used on here, which is called Confessions immediately caught my eye. I think this is because that font is associated with 70's or 80's soul or disco, which would explain the disco ball used for the letter "o" which i thought was perfect for my magazines genre.

I made the text a dark pink because i feel that colour
is identified with soul and R&B. When i added the text
to the photo it didn't look right so i added a black and white gradient at the top of the photo
and cropped the photo as well. I wanted the text to stand out more which was why i added
a dark gradient and i think this was successful.

Magazine Ressurection

after receiving feedback from my other front cover, i have decided to start again and i will show you how i will create my new front cover step by step.

Step 1 : New Photo Of My Brother

The reason why i started again with a new picture was because
i noticed my other designs went really thought and rushed. Therefore
i took a new photo of my brother, this time with him wearing the clothes that are fashionable and can be identified with an R&B/Soul genre of music.
The angle is a low angle shot and i used this because it makes the person in the photo look bigger and therefore,dominant. I wanted the target audience to be for all ages and any social class and i think this was achieved to to no explicit material.

Unfinished Front Cover & Final Design

Left Side: Abandoned Design
Right Side: Final Design

Original Pic and Text

Text i created at home
using Gimp 2.6









Photo of my brother i took at home

My Magazines Genre & The Photos I Taken For It

For a few days i pondered on what genre my magazine would represent. At first i thought i would try rock but that fell through as i felt i would much rather create a soul and RnB magazine as that is the music i am most familiar with. So, bearing in mine my research into magazines and studying how RnB mags are displayed, i asked my brother if i could use him for the photos. He agreed :)
So now i have taken a few demo photos of him to see which pose is best and what kind of angles and clothing he should be wearing. Today, i plan to take more pics of him which i will include in my magazine.

If that wasnt good enough his friends have also offered to help aswell so i am very happy at the moment :D The photos have all been taken in my front room but i plan to edit that out and use a different background in order for it to look for realistic and RnB focused

Music Magazine research and ideas

Today and yesterday we were told that our next piece of coursework would be the designing of a music magazine. This magazine will have to consisit of a front pager, contents and a double page spread. Yesterday i looked up a few magazines that have different target audiences and compared them to each other. I found that depending on the style of text, imagery and the whole layout of the front page you can figure out who the target audience is.

Today i am going to continue this research and then come up with a few ideas about how i am going to create my own magazine, which genre of music i will use and the target audience. We also have to use our own images for this coursework so i will ask a few friends to help me out with these pictures and i know a few of them have a lot of instuments and costumes i could use for the photos.

Evaluation

This is my front cover for my school magazine and contents page .For this, i tried to achieve a successful and realistic magazine cover and make a good contents page . However, this didn't happen and after looking at this front cover now i am not very impressed with it. I did like the way i used the colours in the front cover and the contents page which are also the schools emblem colours. I like the way the gradient works with the colour of the text as well, so that went to plan. Everything on the front cover is deliberate work and nothing is coincidental as i wanted to use the colours fonts and pictures you see, although on the contents some some coincidental work happened where i messed around with gradients and got the black margin on the page, i liked the look of it so i decied to keep it.Unfortunately, i am new and inexperienced to the programs we used and that was a huge setback in making work look decent and realistic like i wanted it to.

I also notice they look quite boring and appear to have not much effort put into it. I tried to overcome some problems for a better design but in the end chose to go for a simpler design. I have learned that media production is not as easy as it looks and takes quite a lot of know how, time and skill in order to create a realistic magazine . After looking back at how i worked on this i am not satisfied in the slightest because i know i would've done a lot better if i took the time and was willing to learn how to use the programs more efficiently.

After comparing my work to other students in my class i must say im not overly pleased with my own work as everybody else seems to have spent more time on their work and theall look more creative than mine. For example, the OCR version looks like it was planned out well rather than just rushing into the work with no idea what to you are going to do. I also like the use of colour and images because they work well together and dont clash.

For the next task i will work a lot harder and put in more time and effort in order to have a successful piece of work which i will be proud of. I have learnt that i must take my work more seriously if i want to achieve what i want my work to look like because i know i have the ability to produce good pieces of work.

Thursday 19th 09

In todays lesson i will update my blog and i will begin to start working on the first stages of my school magazine and taking pictures around the school which i will incorportate into the magazine.

School Magazine

For my media coursework I have to design a front page and contents page for a short magazine which is going to be based on Kelsey Park Sports College. The target audience of this magazine will be the students of the school who would be 11-18 and its purpose will be to inform them of anything that happens within the school.
Before we started this section of the work we looked at various magazines such as heat which helped us to learn how to identify a magazines target audience and purpose by looking at the use of colour, photos and the whole layout of the magazine. After we had analysed some magazines it was time to start experimenting with a program called Adobe Indesign CS3, we learned how to create different text types, colours and shapes using a wide range of tools.

Now I have a basic understanding of how to use Adobe Indesign CS3, I have a few ideas about the design of the front cover. I could possibly black and yellow as the main colours because these colours are in the schools logo and are also the schools tie colours. I still haven't decided how to design the page and how it will be laid out.
However, we can also do some hand drawings and scan them in to use on our magazine designs, which would be helpful if we can't work out how to use a tool in the program properly or if we aren't happy with how it turns out, so drawing our designing and scanning it in works as a helpful alternative.

Furthermore, we took some photos in an earlier stage of our work which gave us an understanding of how magazines used their photos to attract the audience and what the whole magazine is based on. Taking our own photos and using them on our school magazine would also make it better and more realistic.