The main thing I wanted to get out of making my magazine was to create a music magazine that reached the intended audience well and portrayed the message that pop music still has a successful and interested audience and that Poparazzi will make sure that attitude goes on.
This Kerrang magazine front cover was the main inspiration for my front cover. I really liked the layout of the magazine and thought it was something I could adapt with a pop twist as their genre and target audience couldn’t be more different to mine. The first thing that stood out to me on the cover of the Kerrang magazine is the fact the main headline was placed right across the centre of the page. On my first draft, as you can see below, I used this technique but as I improved my cover I didn’t think the band across the page looked too good considering the rest of the content so I decided to change this concept.
This is my first draft of my front cover:
Another thing that I liked about the Kerrang front cover which I did continue onto my final design is the order of the layers. On the Kerrang front cover the main image of Jared Leto is behind the masthead and the main headline although his hand is cleverly in the foreground. On my cover the main image is in front of the masthead but behind the main headline. The other ideas I used from Kerrang were the use of a skyline, a flash graphic containing a competition and the subtitle in a similar position. They advertised their smaller features in a different way to me and they kept them all together under the same title ‘PLUS!’ but I decided to separate them and place them towards the left third.
Vibe magazine was another front cover that I decided to use to get some inspiration from and the main thing that I took from this was the colour scheme of using a tone of pink on my front cover. I also liked the fact they’d used a long shot of Nicki Minaj which meant her whole body was on the cover. I used this idea but used the concept of a Pixie Lott image I had found (see below).
The layout of my contents page is very similar to this one produced in Kerrang. I like the layout of the Kerrang contents because it contains a lot of images but at the same time it still tells you a lot about the features in the magazine. I did change a few things though such as using a lot of block colour on the page and Kerrang only used block colour for the headings. I also created a subscription advert and information about how to get in touch via social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This is a feature that children’s pop magazines offer that I would like to maintain is this teenage/young adult pop magazine. Below is an example of a children’s pop magazine which uses a lot of bold and bright colours to draw people’s attention to different features. This also uses large page numbers and images.
There are certain aspects of my double page spread that are similar to this NME one but there are also some differences. Both of the artists on these two separate double page spreads are sat down and they’re both on the same side of the page. The size of the main image on my cover is smaller though and the size of the text is larger. Because my magazine is a pop magazine I made the writing bigger as there isn’t usually much text on the page, it’s usually just found in a small text box. This follows the conventions of the type of magazine I wanted to create. The other things that are the same on the two double page spreads are the use of a leading paragraph and drop caps to begin the main columns of text. Photo credits and by lines are also used as well as a leading paragraph. One thing that is different is the fact I have used a pull quote on my double page spread which NME haven’t done. This again is something used very commonly in children’s pop magazines so I thought it would be a good to include one of these. Below is an example of one of the children’s pop magazine double page spreads I was talking about.
At the end of the production of the magazine I created and conducted a questionnaire and one of the questions I asked was: ‘how would you improve the front cover, contents page and double page spread?’. From this question there were two things that cropped up to do with all three designs as a whole and they were the colour scheme I have chosen and the amount of images I have used. One person mentioned the fact the colour continuity was good but they would’ve liked to have seen another colour incorporated apart from pink and black. Although I did consider using another colour such as yellow, I decided the layout on the front cover looked how I wanted it to look and therefore to follow the continuity I couldn’t use another colour on the contents page and double page spread. In regards to the amount of images I used, the comment was made because they thought I should’ve used more. I think I could have possibly put another image on the front cover, similar to the Kerrang magazine I had looked at for inspiration but I didn’t feel like I had another appropriate image to use on there and I didn’t want to ruin what I was happy with. I maybe could have put another image on the contents page too but because of the genre and age range of my magazine and the models I used, I think the use of 4 on there was enough.
On my front cover two female media students thought the main image of Scarlett Melody should’ve been a bit larger. I understand the thoughts behind this because the main part of her body is hidden by text but I am happy with the size of the image after playing around with that for a long time.
The contents page was what received the most comments. A lot of people thought the images I used were too big and that I should have used more images that were smaller. The sizes of the images were determined by me needing space to create margins in between the images which made the contents page in blocks. Another thing that was mentioned about my contents page is the size of the writing. I agree with people who mentioned it that the writing is a bit too small but it was also suggested that there should be more writing and more features advertised. A tease line was also suggested at the bottom of the contents page to as a way of including an extra feature.
The layout of my double page spread was said to be the weakest out of the three and one person suggested that this could be improved with less text and a larger image. Personally I would have liked to have had a background on my double page spread and I believe this would have made it seem like everything was linked together better but I lacked the appropriate images to do this.
Doing the questionnaire has definitely allowed me to see my work from another point of view and it was interesting to get other people’s opinions on what I have created. I now know for future reference what I can do differently and what I can improve upon and especially the media students I asked gave me some great ideas that I hadn’t know of or thought about.
Here is a video response to my final designs:
When I asked what genre of music my magazine was in with a list of 6 options to choose from: indie, pop, RnB, rock, jazz and metal, everybody asked apart from 1 male answered correctly with a pop magazine and the other answer was RnB. Those two genres are very similar and there will be features in my magazine that will be RnB too but the original market I chose was for a pop magazine. It could be defined as a chart music magazine.
My media institution that will be responsible for publishing my magazine
After researching many magazine publishers such as IPC Media (http://www.ipcmedia.com/) I decided that Bauer Media would be the best publisher for my magazine Poparazzi as they run 300 different magazines across 15 countries in the world. In 2008 Bauer Media joined the Bauer Media Group who were well renowned for producing magazines and radio. The multi-platform UK based media group launched their first magazine in 1953 which was the Angling Times. This was followed by the Motor Cycle News which started the Bauer Media Group we know today. Bauer Media pride themselves on their understanding of the audiences they’re reaching out to and with the results of my questionnaire, I believe I have targeted my magazine well to the audience I was aiming for. Another big success came for the group when they bought what was then a small magazine named For Him Magazine but this is now known as FHM, the best selling multi-platform brand in the world. Some of the current magazines they have on the market that are either music magazines or celebrity gossip magazines are Kerrang, Heat, more!, MOJO and Q. My main target audience was females between the ages of 15-21 and the only similar magazines are Heat with an audience of ABC1 women aged 16-35 and more! with an audience of women aged 18-24. Neither of these magazines are purely music magazines like mine is. The music magazines they have on offer are Kerrang, MOJO and Q and they are all aimed at males that have an acquired music taste. Bauer Media also own many radio stations across the UK and bought the digital TV music channel ‘The Box’ in 1996 which offers a range of chart music. This reassures me that they are aware and interested in the type of music my magazine has to offer and that they would be perfect to publish my magazine. (http://www.bauermedia.co.uk/)
The audience of my music magazine, how I’ve attracted them and how they are represented
From the beginning of this project I had wanted the target audience for my music magazine to be youngsters with a mean age of 17/18. I wanted it to appeal to both males and females but the ratio was intended on being 80% females and 20% males. The social economic groups I was aiming my product at are C2, D and E. I think I have kept my audience quite similar throughout although there were some changes and decisions that I had to make to ensure my target audience stayed the same. The ideology behind my magazine is to encourage young people to be themselves and enjoy their own style of music which makes them who they are.
At the beginning of the project when I was researching magazines that I could use as inspiration for my own design, the pop magazines on the market already such as TOTP (http://www.totpmag.com/)
and We Love Pop (http://www.welovepopmag.co.uk/) seemed to be targeted at a young audience and they were very “cheesy”. This meant from the start I knew I had to think of something different to make my pop magazine target an older audience. To do this I decided I should only use one main image on the front cover and follow some of the ideas of NME and Kerrang who have older target audiences. The contents page also has fewer images on than a typical child/teenage pop magazine and includes a lot more writing. Pop magazines that I have looked at don’t use a conventional double page spreads layout, they use a lot of images on one page and lots of little text boxes that holds the small amount of information. I have changed this layout to create a double page spread that is more typical of existing magazines like NME.
The front cover image I decided to use is very different to something you would fine on the cover of TOPT. The clothes that Scarlett Melody is wearing are quite revealing and this would be something that I would not want to advertise on the front cover of a child’s magazine. I think this is an accurate representation considering my target audience though because these are the types of clothes girls would wear on a night out and to attract the male’s attention, they like to see girls wearing these clothes. It also shows Melody cares about how she looks which is an important aspect of many teenagers’ lives: how they look. The fact I have used a teenager on the cover of a teenagers magazine also reaches out to the audience I’m aiming for because it wouldn’t have had the same effect if I’d used somebody middle aged or older. This is partially because of the way they look and dress but also because they wouldn’t have a career in the pop world. The colour scheme is also an important part of attracting the right audience because it gives people a clue as to who should be buying the magazine.
In my questionnaire I asked what age range they thought the magazine was aimed at and at which sex. The age range options given were 6-11, 12-14, 15-21 or other. 85% of the people asked thought the magazine was aimed at 15-21 year olds which is the age range I was aiming it. This shows the adjustments and decisions I have made reach the intended audience. The other 15% of people opted for 12-14 year olds. Interestingly the 15% were girls and that’s who the magazine is aimed at so some younger girls may want to buy the magazine too. When asked about what sex the magazine was for 79% said it is aimed at females and the other 21% said it was aimed at both sexes. This is also the result I wanted as my target audience is 80% females and 20% males. 2 males said it was aimed at both males and females which shows they would think about buying the magazine.
Pop magazines generally don’t have a colour scheme and they use a lot of different colours throughout the magazine but again to make this reach out to an older audience I decided to use a colour scheme although it isn’t that conventional. Front covers of magazines usually use colours such as red, yellow and black but using pink for me still meant I was giving the magazine a pop twist. This also indicates that the main target audience are females.
Other things that attract an audience are competitions, the artist’s names who feature and images. I decided to use a skyline on my front cover and here I listed some artist’s names that are inside the magazine. This is a selling technique that allows people to know what to expect without having to pick the magazine up and search through it. The artist who is the main image also attracts the audience because if you like that artist you are going to want to buy the magazine to see what they have to say. I also used a flash containing a chance to win tickets to see Rihanna. If you’re a big fan you’re going to want to buy the magazine to have a chance to win the tickets. Every week there will be different featured artists on the cover and this will entice a different audience. There will be some people who buy the magazine weekly and then there will be some people who buy it every now and again when the features appeal to them. I decided that this magazine would be published weekly as there is a gap in the market for a weekly pop magazine and in my questionnaire I asked the question ‘how often would you buy the magazine?’ My results gathered that there is an audience that would buy my magazine on a weekly basis and the second most popular result was monthly. Some people said they would buy my magazine every two weeks which is also good. 14% of people who said they would never buy my magazine were males which is fair because my magazine is aimed 80% at females. They may also not buy my magazine because pop music is not the genre of music they listen to.
This is a pie chart to show how often people would buy my magazine:
My main target audience is in the social economic groups C2, D and E because they will mainly be students or in education, just out of college and looking for work or just starting a job. This means they won’t have a lot of money to spend on things such as magazines because they like to have a good time. A lot of the money they spend is on things such as clothes were they spend an average of £450 a year. Music is important to them though. 95% of my target population own a music playing device and 65% of them spend money on buying music either as a hard copy or as a downloadable version. 100% of them use the internet spending an average of 2.8 hours a day on there. 78% said they have worked at some point and they earned an average of £180 a month.
Here is a video showing what a 17 year old girl spends her money and time on:
Because of this information I found out about how young people spend their time, I have set a price of £2.10 for my magazine. When asked about the pricing of my magazine in the questionnaire the most popular price people would pay for my magazine is £2.50 followed by £2.00. this is a positive response considering the price I had chosen and I think it is a reasonable, affordable price. When looking at weekly magazines that are already on the market, they are all under the price of £2.50. NME is sold for £2.40 and Kerrang is sold for £2.20. I used these price ranges to decide what to charge for my own magazine. I also created the chance to subscribe to the magazine which means they will get the magazine 20% cheaper.
Here is a video showing what a 17 year old girl spends her money and time on:
Because of this information I found out about how young people spend their time, I have set a price of £2.10 for my magazine. When asked about the pricing of my magazine in the questionnaire the most popular price people would pay for my magazine is £2.50 followed by £2.00. this is a positive response considering the price I had chosen and I think it is a reasonable, affordable price. When looking at weekly magazines that are already on the market, they are all under the price of £2.50. NME is sold for £2.40 and Kerrang is sold for £2.20. I used these price ranges to decide what to charge for my own magazine. I also created the chance to subscribe to the magazine which means they will get the magazine 20% cheaper.
Here is a graph to show the results of the pricing question on my questionnaire:
What I have learnt about technologies while creating my media product
Throughout this process I have not only learnt a lot about Photoshop because I hadn’t used it before but I have also learnt how to use blogger, how to create a Prezi as a part of my planning and how to upload videos onto the internet.
To help me use Photoshop I used a lot of YouTube videos as a media way of learning.
This is the video I used to make my model have porcelain skin:
Firstly I used the spot healing tool to cover up the blemishes and moles that she had on her skin by putting the mouse over the mark on her skin and clicking the button down. This made the blemish blend into the colour of her skin to make it look clear.
After doing this a separate box appears and this allows you to manipulate the image more.
This process makes the whole image look very blurry and that is not what I want so i had to erase everything that isn't skin to make it look sharp again. The skin always looks to blurry after this step but by changing the opacity it makes it look sharper again while still having an effect on the quality of the skin. This is how I gave my model porcelain skin.
I also learnt how to change hair colour using this YouTube video:
This is how I chose the colour the new hair was going to be using the colour picker. I then selected a soft brush to paint over the original hair and I made sure it looked a similar/natural tone throughout.
I was then able to use the eraser tool and the cutting tool to make sure the colour was only on the hair and it wasn't on the rest of the background.
I was then able to use the hue/saturation tool to change the colour of the hair completely. I decided on this dark blue colour because I think the contrast with the skin colour looks very good and I think it looks more natural and suites her face more. It also goes well with the clothing she has on and isn't too "in your face".
These we just a few of the techniques I used to help me create the finish I wanted to. A lot of the time I struggled to remember to create a copy of my original image and this meant at some points I had to redo what I had done. I also learnt that there’s a limited amount of times you can undo your work and so some layers I had to delete and start that again if it wasn’t how I wanted it to be. The thing that took me the longest to work out was how to edit the text once you had written something and clicked off that layer. I ended up deleting a lot of the text at times to start it again. That was until I found out how to edit what I had already done and this technique came in very handy towards the end of the project when I had to change all the typefaces so they weren’t the same as the mastheads. Another tool that really helped me throughout the process was the quick selection tool. Until I learnt what this did I was just using the polygonal lasso tool which took a very long time to cute out images and it gave it a very straight edge making it look unrealistic and it didn’t blend into the background. I used the transform tool in the edit option at the top of the page and this was very useful because I could change the size of the image, rotate it and flip images. The blur tool really started to annoy me by the end of the project because it didn’t work for me as well so I started to use the rubber to make it blend into the background instead. The rubber was also helpful when I had to rub out the extra colour of the hair after I had changed the colour of it.
Preliminary task comparison
Preliminary task comparison
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I think I have learnt a lot since I did my preliminary task. Although there are some similarities there are a lot of differences and I think my music magazine has a more professional finish. One thing that I seem to have done the same is only using two colours in my colour scheme. A lot of magazines and a lot of other people in the class have used more than two colours but I have found the two seem to work best for me. That is definitely a way I could think to change my front cover though if I have to create one again in the future. I have taken a lot more time and effort to create my music magazine and I think that shows. Firstly I have a skyline on my music magazine which is regular convention on music magazines in the shops. My college magazine didn’t feature one of these because I made the masthead bigger instead and when I tried incorporating one I didn’t think it looked great. The mastheads are completely different on the two designs. My college magazine has a very boring type face for the masthead and this is then continued throughout the cover which I did do on one of my first drafts of my music magazine. The masthead is the identity of the magazine though and this needs to stand out from the rest of the text on the page and this is why I changed it on my music magazine front cover. I chose not to put a block around the masthead on my music magazine because of me using blocks behind the cover lines which is another difference to my college magazine. I certainly learnt a lot doing the college magazine beforehand because I had never used photo shop before and it gave me a head start rather than having to learn everything when doing my music magazine. I used a lot of different techniques when doing my music magazine which I didn’t use doing my college magazine for example creating a tan on my model. This was done using the colour balance tool which I found very useful. I also worked on the skin another way by making it smoother using the spot fixing tool and the blur tool. I think it made a difference in the final product. The final thing that is very different to my college magazine is where the price, date and issue number are placed. On my college magazine I put them above the barcode but looking at it now it doesn’t look very good. On my music magazine I put this information at the top of the barcode so it made it look tidier and was smaller.
Throughout this process I have learnt a lot because I had never used photo shop before. Everything I have done has been new to me and this is why I used a lot of YouTube videos to help me and learn on my own (these can be seen on my blog). A lot of the time I struggled to remember to create a copy of my original image and this meant at some points I had to redo what I had done. I also learnt that there’s a limited amount of times you can undo your work and so some layers I had to delete and start that again if it wasn’t how I wanted it to be. The thing that took me the longest to work out was how to edit the text once you had written something and clicked off that layer. I ended up deleting a lot of the text at times to start it again. That was until I found out how to edit what I had already done and this technique came in very handy towards the end of the project when I had to change all the typefaces so they weren’t the same as the mastheads. Another tool that really helped me throughout the process was the quick selection tool. Until I learnt what this did I was just using the polygonal lasso tool which took a very long time to cute out images and it gave it a very straight edge making it look unrealistic and it didn’t blend into the background. I used the transform tool in the edit option at the top of the page and this was very useful because I could change the size of the image, rotate it and flip images. The blur tool really started to annoy me by the end of the project because it didn’t work for me as well so I started to use the rubber to make it blend into the background instead. The rubber was also helpful when I had to rub out the extra colour of the hair after I had changed the colour of it.
My overall opinion on my work
Overall I am pretty happy with the work I have done but I am aware there are areas I could improve on. I like my front cover a lot but I would like to have put a smaller image in the left third. I am very happy with my contents page and I like the style and the colour I have used on it. I like the amount of images I have used and I think the layout is very accurate and how I wanted it to turn out. My double page spread is where I think I have let myself down. I would’ve liked to put a background on the double page spread and I think this would automatically make it look a lot better. I would also have used more images on it and created it more like my original plan.
