Planning Music Magazine

Flat plans
I have created some flat plans to help me decide how I want the front cover of my music magazine to look. 

I like this one because the main image is huge, this is important for the audience to see as they will recognise the artist and hopefully want to purchase the magazine. I also like that there is lots of images around the main image because it reveals more about what's inside the magazine. The masthead is also in the top left because this will be one of the first things the audience reads and it needs to be in the top left for them to know what magazine they are looking at is.

I also like this one because there is a lot of focus on the overlapping artist's name over the main image. This is important because the audience will instantly know what artist the top story is about is and this will hopefully make them interested in the story. I also like that the masthead is spread out in the middle of the page however if I chose to call my music magazine 'Rock' this is a short masthead and it may not spread all the way over the front cover compared to the name 'Drummer.'

Choosing the right photos - Tenacious D

Myself and a couple of family members brought tickets to see Tenacious D live in concert. I used this to my advantage and took photographs of the rock group so I could add images of them into my magazine, emphasising the rock image. Also giving my readers a chance to win Tenacious D tickets to see them also. I chose from a variety of 59 photos and chose the best couple to show in my magazine, making it seem more professional to my audience. Here are some of the not so good images:

As you can see from these photographs, the quality of the images are blurry because my camera was out of focus. This was one of the disadvantages of taking photos at a concert as there are many flashing lights and it is hard to get a good photograph of the performers.

However I did manage to get some rather good quality photographs because I took my time at achieving the best possible photos by moving to a better position to see the band. Here are some of the better ones:

As you can see all of these images are higher quality than the last ones because I took more time to take them. These are the ones I will use in my music magazine for the competition.

I had to decide the best photographs to use in my rock magazine, here's some of the photographs taken that night:

I also took 27 photographs of the new Squire Fender Strat guitar. I took extreme close-up shots to show audiences the finest detail of the guitar. I again chose my favorite photos that show detail about features the guitar has, such as the tone and volume buttons. 

Shadowing effect

I have chosen this masthead font and layout, as it best suits the layout I want for my magazine. Using Serif Page Plus allows me to easily move and annotate things to look how I want it to. The look at the moment may change depending on what my photo-shoot photos look like once they are finished, this is just a rough layout to help me for my starting piece layout to help me for my starting piece.

                                                         

                                                       

Choosing my favorite place to have the photo-shoot allows me to create my magazine to best suit how I want it to look like how I imagined it. I messaged Craig telling him a time and a location of when we are meeting. Showing how I organised my time to fit in everything in advance,to preparing me for when I eventually start to design my magazine.

When analyzing contents pages, double page spreads and the cover pages of magazines, I have taken them into consideration, using the professional examples to create my own and have come up with this design which I feel best suits the style of magazine I'm going for. It's simple and has black, white and red as a color scheme, which seems appropriate for my chosen genre of rock, especially black. Using a thick black filler to run throughout the magazines pages, giving my magazine a unique theme.

This is the basic design of the front cover of the kind of magazine I'm going for, showing a stylish  teenager for the audience to look at, I am currently designing a competition for the readers and photos of what to expect from inside the magazine; showing the audience the latest gear upon release.

Photo manipulation

On my content page, I have included a close up shot of a newly released guitar. However with my poor photographic skills, I accidentally took the photo with part of the guitar out of frame. Using my photo editing and manipulation skills I the decided to recreate this part of the guitar. 

The reason I did this was because it makes the guitar look more aesthetically pleasing for my audience. By using shapes with the shape tool, I was able to reapply the same colour of the guitar, for the shape to blend into the guitar.

Cutout studio

Using the cutout studio within Serif Page Plus allowed me to cut along the guitar in order to remove the background. This is because I wanted a photograph of just the guitar on the cover of my magazine to advertise the new guitar. Therefore I cut around and removed the edges to do this.