PLANNING - Eval. Q1

Use

Positioning – The positioning of the various elements on my front page was challenging. Of course, I had the masthead at the top, behind the main image, much like Kerrang! does, which follows the normal conventions of magazines. I also placed the posters at the bottom, and tilted them slightly, which is also quite common. For the story summaries, I decided to frame the models’ faces with the main story on the left side, and the other three on the right. This meant that the models are still the main focus of the cover.
On my contents page, I set it out quite differently to what is usually seen in music magazines. However, I still used things like an editor’s note and page numbers. I put the page numbers in the bottom right corner of every story, and put the editor’s note at the top, right of the masthead. I also set out the contents page so the stories go in order.
For the double page spread, I took inspiration from an NME spread I analyzed before making mine. I used a large image on the right side of the spread, with a large title residing in the top left. The text was quite small, and took up the bottom left. This is a fairly common layout, even if it does get shifted around sometimes.

Cover Image – The positioning of the image on the front page is very important. I took inspiration again from magazines like Kerrang!, which commonly have fairly close-up images of their main interviewee, which creates a lot of impact and draws the attention of the customer. I attempted to use the same technique, but because I have two people as my main story, fitting them in was more difficult. I overcame this by having the two models stand with one head above the other, which countered the problem of aligning the image with the page because it ran with the page orientation.

Text – I used different alignments of text on the front page to, like I said before, frame the models. I did this by having the text on the left aligned to the left, and the text on the right aligned to the right. This also meant that the edge of the text on each side backed onto the edge of the page.
On my contents page, all the text is aligned to the left, leading in to the respective picture on the right. The page numbers are put to the right, as that is where they are commonly found on many contents pages, no matter the design.
The text on my double page spread is again, largely put to the left, as is evident in the article text. The same goes for the text in the box-out. In the article itself, I had all the text white, but put the headers of each paragraph (they were questions in this case) in bold, so they provided natural breaks in the text, and made it obvious where each paragraph started.

Box Outs – I used a box-out on my double page spread. As they usually contain extra information about the story it is tied to, I decided to include miscellaneous information about the two people I interviewed, such as their hobbies.


Develop

Colour Scheme - While researching various magazines, I found that some, like Q Magazine, use a fairly consistent colour theme. Q uses white and red throughout their pages, so I decided to do the same thing. I chose red and black as my colours, as they represent the genre/s of music I wanted my magazine to cover. However, I tried to keep it quite subtle, so the reds and blacks are overall quite dull, compared to some of the other colours. I did this so my audience wouldn’t get bored of the repeated colours

((Contents Page - I can’t say how I developed the contents page of my magazine from other magazines, because it is really different. I could say that I observed how many other magazines’ contents pages are quite heavily text-based. So in light of that, I decided to go to the other extreme, and keep the amount of text as low as I could. I just included the main stories, which meant I could have pictures of the main focus of the contents page.))

Double Page Spread - My front page was inspired a fair amount by this NME spread with Lily Allen. I used the same layout, because it is very simple and easy to see what is where. I did, however, include a box-out, something that the NME spread didn’t do. I added it to include a little fact-file about the two interviewees. Whereas most titles use a single alignment - left, centre or right - I decided to have each line aligned differently. This made it a little more interesting to look at, as well as filling up some of the excess space there would have been, if I had used just one alignment.


Challenge

Front Cover - Many magazines put their headline in the centre of the page. This gives it impact and can be seen easily. However, I did manage to find some magazine covers that didn’t do this, so for my headline, I set it to the left (and made it larger than the other stories, so it was more obvious that it was a headline). I did this half out of necessity, because due to the lower model’s clothes, I couldn’t find a colour which worked across the black/grey of the background, the navy blue of the model’s jacket, and the white/blue of his t-shirt. If I had done, then there would have been too many different colours in one block of text.

Contents Page - My contents page is hugely different from any other magazine contents page I found.. I felt that other music magazine contents pages had too much on them, and were heavily text-based. Therefore, I decided to minimise the amount of text I used, which meant only showing the main stories, and utilising pictures to show what the story was about, accompanied by only a few words.