I have not finished editing my work yet.

Magazine Newsstand Task.

                                                                                                                                                 

One thing I noticed when looking at the different music magazines at the news-stand was that the music magazine titles were all very unique to their specific music genres within the magazines. Furthermore, it was noticeable that the two main locations of the titles on the magazines were either on the top left hand corner of the magazines or the top centre of the magazines. The majority of titles were displayed in a very large and bold way making the titles extremely noticeable and eye catchy. In further detail, almost all of the magazine front covers are content full meaning they have very few empty spaces on the front cover. Also, with regards to cover lines and images, it was clear that most of the magazine front covers contained an average of eight cover lines with one main enlarged image placed at the centre of the magazine. Moreover, as you can see in the images, the most popular magazines are placed at the front of the news-stand hence allowing shoppers to visualise the full font covers of the popular magazine,whilst, on the other hand, the less popular magazines are placed at the back of the news-stand meaning shoppers can only only see the titles, mastheads and teasers of the less popular magazines.

Magazine Distribution Methods:

- Sale or Return: The distributor gives a set number of magazines to outlets (e.g. 20), if less than what is given out sells (e.g. 15), the remaining magazines (e.g. 5) will be returned.

- Online Publishing: This consists of E-Zines which look like magazines but can be accessed on the internet. Also, this consists of online magazine subscriptions as well as subscribing to iPad and Kindle versions of a magazine, hence meaning the physical copy is replaced. Furthermore, it includes magazine advertisements on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

- Direct Distribution: This is when the magazines are given out for free to all members of the target audience.

- Postal Subscription: This is when people pay to receive weekly or monthly magazines posted to their house. This has been a very effective distribution method as it saves people's time due to the fact that they do not have to leave their houses and most people prefer to stay at home.

What I Done During The Lesson.

In today's lesson, I practised text manipulation on Adobe Illustrator in order to gain more of an understanding on the software, hence meaning I will be able to produce a really good masthead for my own original magazine creation.

Magazine Proposal

Magazine Proposal

Magazine Title:

The name of my magazine will be Vibez. I have chosen this to be the title of my magazine due to the fact that the word Vibez within the chosen title correlates with the two specific genres that I have chosen to base my magazine on as the genres provide a certain vibe to the audience.

Chosen Music Genre(s):

With regards to my music genre, I would like to use the following genres of Rap and R&B within my magazine. However the main reason for me choosing these genres is due to the fact that both Rap and R&B music is in extremely high demand by the vast majority of individuals as both genres provide the audience with a happy and lively vibe.

Design Features:

My masthead will supposedly match my chosen colour scheme and will include two letters which are S and F, standing for sooth flow. I don’t want my masthead to be simple as I feel that having a simple masthead may make my magazines front cover look boring, so it will have to be eye-catching. Also, the lettering will be a suitable size (size 8 or size 9) and will be a suitable colour from my chosen colour scheme. Furthermore, I have decided that my colour scheme will be blue, dark grey and light grey as they are all very simple but exciting colours.

Magazine Publisher:

After some hard thought, I have come to the decision that Bauer Media will be the publisher of my magazine. Initially, I was thinking of Townsquare Media being the publisher of my magazine but I decided to change to Bauer Media as they are very well known within the UK, which is where my magazine will primarily be distributed. Furthermore, Bauer Media have been very successful within the music magazine industry having published ‘Kerrang!’ magazine for many years.

Target Audience:

The target audience of my magazine will be both males and females aged 16-25. The reasoning behind my chosen target audience is that both males & females really enjoy listening to R&B and Rap music. Furthermore, I have chosen the age group of 16-25 due to the fact that it has been statistically proven that the average person is mainly interested in R&B and Rap music from 16-25. In addition, I feel as if the target audience will mainly be lower and middle class people as upper class people are rich and don’t usually show interests in my chosen music genres.

Content to Include:

Two examples of artists that I may include within my magazine are Bryson Tiller and Meek Mill. This is because both artists represent my chosen genres extremely well. In further detail, Bryson Tiller is an up and coming R&B artist who has already produced a fantastic debut album called ‘Trap Soul’ recently, whilst, Meek Mill has been in the rap game since a teenager looking for a way out of the gang life and has been producing top quality rap songs such as ‘Monster’ and ‘Ready or Not’.

Also, I will include a few free gifts within the magazine that act as a thank you gift to all members of the target audience that decide to purchase my magazine.

Moreover, my aim is include things within my magazine and to do things to my magazine in order to make it different from magazines that have already been published. An example of something I could do to make it different is including random up to date mix tape CD’s in the magazines at no extra cost. This would make my magazine unique and would also help the income received from the sales of my magazine massively.

Ideas From My Case Studies.

The case studies that I chose to analyse contained some really good ideas. However, I feel that the XXL magazine contained a lot more ideas as I could relate to the genres represented within the magazine in a better way than I could with the Kerrang magazine. 

The two main things that I liked on the front cover of the XXL magazine was the colour scheme used and the image used. These things gave me fantastic ideas as they illustrated the fact that I could be a lot more flexible in selecting both a colour scheme and an image for my front cover within the future.

Referring to the Kerrang magazine's front cover, there was only one main thing on the front cover that I liked and it was the image. The image was very powerful and conveyed/portrayed a strong meaning.

Preliminary Task Evaluation

Self-Evaluation:

The main thing that I wanted to achieve when working on my preliminary task was to produce a decent front cover and contents page for my college magazine. The reason for me wanting to achieve this is that I wanted to aim for a professional-like production regarding both the front cover and contents page due to the fact that I wanted to give myself a challenge. I wanted to achieve this by using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign in order to manipulate multiple images and text variations so that I could attempt to produce a good front cover and contents page.

There are both many good things and many bad things within the front cover and contents page I have produced. With regards to the front cover, the good things are that I stuck to a simple colour scheme and I included all of the vital/important things in which a front cover of a magazine should have. A few examples of these things are cover lines, a skyline, a flash puff, a barcode, a price, an image and a masthead. However the bad things with the front cover include me not including a date and not laying out the text & the image appropriately. On the other hand, referring to my contents page, the good things are that the contents page is very well laid out, it looks professional and I have included all of the necessary information in which a contents page needs. However the bad thing about my contents page is that I only included two images on the page when there should have been a minimum of three images.

Others think that between my front cover and my contents page, the contents page is the better production. They have said that this is because my contents page looks very professional and appealing to members of the target audience due to the colour (green) within the images I used connoting happiness, whilst my front cover is quite dull and poorly laid out hence making it look much less professional than my contents page.

My three main points for improvement are:

1.      To improve the overall layout of my front cover by putting things on the front cover in appropriate places so that the front cover will look more professional and more appealing to the audience.

2.      To add more content to the front cover by filling up unused spaces with more puff flashes and more cover lines. This will enhance the look of my front cover and will make it look less boring & more exciting.

3.      To add an extra image or two to my contents page. Although this would mean that I have to rearrange my contents page, it would result in more images correlating with the information that is already provided within the contents page.

Work In Progress

In today's lesson I struggled to complete my initial idea of remaking my contents page on InDesign instead of Photoshop due to the fact that the image manipulation on InDesign was playing up every time I wanted to insert an image onto the document. This means that I now have to attempt to do it again at home later on.

Work In Progress

In today's lesson, having found out that the contents page for my college magazine had to be created on in design, I tried to re-create the one that I had already made on Photoshop.

Preliminary Task: Contents Page

Preliminary Task: Front Cover