Evaluation

Music Magazine- Double Page Spread

Music Magazine Contents

Music Magazine Front Cover- Final Draft

This is my final draft, I have changed the name and the colour and I put a 3-D shadow effect on it which makes it more prominent and attracts the readers eye. I moved things around like the price and the month the magazine is released and the issue number. I put a shadow effect on the other features within the magazine.

Music Magazine Front Cover- First Draft

This is the first draft of my front cover

Title font

This is my masthead font. It is called Turnpike. I have chosen this because it looks quite prominent and it stands out, just like rock should.

This is what Vision would look like in Turnpike:

I obviously have to work on it, for example, I would have it a different colour and maybe put some effects on it like shadow or something.

Moodboard

This is my moodboard, every image is related to rock because all the artists, be it new or old, are rock bands of some sort.

Contents Analysis 1

Contents Analysis 2

Front Cover Analysis 1 and 2

A Few Photos I Have Taken On My Photoshoot

Music Magazine Title Ideas

I had a few ideas for a title for my music magazine. Some of them weren't very good but others were good enough. I need a title that is suitable for a rock magazine and what connotations can be said behind these titles.
Tame was an idea of mine. I thought that this was quite a catchy name but it wouldn't really suit the rock genre because tame means to keep something under control and calm which rock really isn't.
My next idea was Raw. I thought this was too simple and quite over-used and too obvious for a rock magazine.
My final consideration was Vision. I liked this a lot because every musician has a vision and a vision is really important to music itself so I will probably use this as my title.

Contents Page

Photoshop- Editing My Images

Here are some examples of my manipulation of the images that I took on my camera:

The bottom photo is the one I edited. I removed a plant that I felt was ruining the photo in the bottom left of the photo. It was also covering some of the writing. I removed the wire that was going up the wall for the same reason I removed the plant.

The bottom one is the photo I edited. As you can see, there is a cluster of mess in the middle of the room which I needed to remove to make it look better.

School Magazine Cover

This is the cover of the school magazine for the preliminary task we were set. The reason we did this was that we needed to get used to Photoshop and Publisher for the main task of creating the music magazine in a couple of weeks.

Prelim photoshoot

These are the photos we took at Deyes. We took these photos to save time and to show the new technology, the Apple macs, and say that these are at Maricourt. Most classrooms look the same in most schools so it was easy to do this. In the photos, it shows me working and another pupil, Laura, working. This would convey that Maricourt has hard working pupils. It also shows Mr Howard teaching a couple of students which represents the caring nature of the teachers and their relationship with its students. We will take a lot more in Maricourt when we go back. We will use some of the cameras in the art department.

The shots that we have taken of me and Laura working are meduim shots. This is enough to show that we are working in the book and looking at the board. A couple of the these type of shots will be used in the prelim task.

We are going to have to take a more varied range of pictures in Maricourt. Maybe take some photos of the younger years like in year 8. I was thinking that I could put photos up of the recent Sierra Leone trip in Africa that some of the sixth pupils went on. This would show how our school helps the school in Sierra Leone, which is called St Raphaels.

Photoshop Tutorials

When I create and design my music magazine, I am going to have to use Photoshop. This program will help make my music magazine as good as it can be. We were learning how to use different tools in order to make the image better including cropping, contrast/ brightness, spot heal and clone stamp. Here is a couple of examples:

 

In the first picture, the majority of the image is of the background, which is the sky. The planes look too small compared to it. In order to get rid of some of the sky, we had to crop it into a suitable size so that there is still some background, but the image is now more focused on the planes more now.





The next tool we used was adjusting the brightness and contrast. In the first picture, there is too much light and exposure. We had to adjust the brightness and contrast to make the image as clear as possible. To do this there were colour curves which we had to drag above or below the line to get as much clarity as we could.

Front Page Designs

This is the image I have drawn from the cover of Heat magazine. This will serve as a guide to what my front page will look like when I do my music magazine.

Heat Magazine

Here I have drawn the template of Heat magazine. It is laid out in a different way to a film magazine for example.

Initial genre magazine research

There are many genres for music. There is rock, indie, hip-hop, R&B, metal, and many more. Magazines are designed differently depending on what genre the magazine focuses on. A couple of the examples I've chosen are similar to what design I'm aiming for because I am focusing on the rock genre.




For example, NME focus on rock and indie. A band called Biffy Clyro are featured in the magazine but only the the band's vocalist and lead guitarist, Simon Neil, is on the front cover. Their music is quite heavy rock. The masthead is formal and not very unusual. The sub-headings are also quite formal, there is no special text or font.

Another example is Kerrang, who focus on the metal genre, as you can tell by the central image of one of the members of a band called Slipknot. The masthead is quite powerful and it stands out. It reflects the angry nature of the music that is in this magazine.

Newsletter Ideology

Ideology is the ideas behing a texy, the secret agenda of its producers. In sociological terms, ideology is a body of ideas or set of beliefs that underpins a process or institution and leads to social relations. These set of beliefs are those held by groups withinh society, and the prevalet ones are those held by the ruling/dominant groups.

My ideology for the Newsletter:

• Show how the teachers care for the pupils by putting an image of a teacher helping a pupil in thier work. this would show the caring naturte of the staff.
• I would put a chart of the results from the past year to show that the school had performed well academically.
• I would put on the events being held at the school because it would be showcasing the pupils talents and making sure that we use these talents to the full
• Show how modern the school is by putting an image of the language lab, which has modern computers and an interactive board, on the newsletter. Also, I would put an image of the study room on the newletter because this was only built last year and you can get access to netbooks.

Questionnaire

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFotNVZSb01yM0E2bjVCdC1kUjNSQUE6MQ#gid=0

I wanted to go relatively casual with the questionnaire and make it quite informal so its easy to read but also make it informative so people know what they are filling in.

Alsop Newsletter Analysis

http://www.alsophigh.org.uk/School_docs/Newsletter.pdf

The Alsop high school newsletter is spread out onto one page and i think this is the ideal length for a newsletter as it contains all of the key points in broken down paragraphs which also makes them easy to read, the fact that it is so short could be seen as a bad point of the newsletter but i believe that it makes it better because it isnt alot to read and the vital information is portrayed easily on the one page.

A negative of this newsletter is the fact that it is mostly in black and white, and the fact that it isnt in colour could put people off that are going to read it because it makes the Alsop newsletter look dull. The fact that there is only one picture could also be a bad point as there could be a few more to make the newsletter look more accessable.

I think the Alsop high school newlsetter appeals to its target audience perfectly as the number of text on the one page isnt too long and it possesses the key facts that parents want to know, and compared to the deyes high school newsletter, that has games and puzzles appeal to children more than the adults, and the fact Alsop dont do that means they probably pay more attention to their target audience which is a good thing.

The use of the 'Headteachers message' on the newsletter is again a nice touch and i believe that it also helps break the text up, and gives the impression the parents are in contact with the headteacher.

By Nick Farley and Liam Rabbette

Task Briefing

For the next few months I will be working on a music magazine. I have to design a front cover, a contents page and a double page spread.