Evaluation

This here is my overall evaluation of the produced products as a whole. overall ithink that i was pretty much successful in what i achieved with this magazine front cover, contents page and two page double spread, i enjoyed producing the front cover the most as i spent more time and effort on it i enjoyed playing about with the fonts where the text is concerned and moving the image around to fit with the text, however i do believe that improvements could still be made to make my produced final product better overall for example i did notice that i had forgotten the little bits that a normal magazine front cover usually has, things such as the date, barcode and price i think that the position that i situated the main title was a good one as it catches the receptors eye from the point as soon as they look at the magazine the striking bold green colour around the edge of the title was really good i feel aswell as it brings the title "alive" and more out of the page, the central image was situated in a good place following straight on from the title, doing this achieves the receptors eye to cover much more of the magazine front cover due to all the text and image linking together to keep the readers eye flowing over the page. as a whole i think that the magazine products i created appealed to my target audience this was early to late teenagers of course who are interested in electric indie music. the main reason for choosing to focus into electric indie music for a magazine was because due to all the research that i carried out i found out that indie, rock and hih hop was mainly the three genres that were covered by magazines, so i felt that it would be a good idea to focus more into one of these genres more as a sub genre as indie was only covered briefly by some magazine publishers anyway, so that means there was very few magazine publishers that cover the genre in music of electric indie, however the downfall of this was that there was noother magazine that i could find from this genre as it was so focused to use as my style model.
I think that my contents page was reasonably successful as i met the requirements that i aimed to achieve from the word go, this main requirement was to keep the page simple as possible, i went about achieving this by only placing on the page the information that was only releavent, in this case only having the information of briefly covering what was on each and every page, i think personally that i justified the whole simpleness thing with what i have done, however it could be argued that i needed images perhaps but i chose to not include images because my style model i used that was "Q" magazine had no images on their contents page so i decided to follow the same suite as them with that. i think that the method i used to make the main story of this issue stand out was really good and effective for the reason that it is one of the first thing that the receptors eye focuses on therefore meaning that they will become hopefully more dragged in and want to read this story and turn to that exact page.i went against the usual trend and conventions of magazine layouts with the page numbers and decided to put them before and on top of the brief overview of the pages content instead of apposed to underneath and after the text.
The double page spread was where i could possibly make most of my improvements firstly starting with the accuracy of the information that i have given this includes the fault of mine where i wrote "Random Gender World Tour"and when doing the listings of the venues i listed seven of the venues that are in europe so it is not really a world tour so that was the most major improvement i could of made, another fault i failed to include in my two page spread was the ticket prices for the tour of the electric indie band "random gender" also with the playlist where i have placed the bright pink on the bright green background it did not work very well at all as the reader is unable to read the information as two bright colours disguises them as they cancel each other out. perhaps it would of been better for me to use an alternative colour such as black on the pink background for example just simply for the readers clarity. again i wanted to keep this page as simple as possible however one of the mistakes i think i made on this page was by not having enough images, i think perhaps an image may have worked a little better on this page however it does distract the readers attention away from the text and relevant information that is given.
overall i think with the whole final designs i had done a good job however one main improvement i could have made was to spend a lot more time on altering and changing around what needed to be done and to pay much more attention to the finer detail.

Final Designs

This here pictured on the left is my final front cover design all in all i think that it is pretty successful. i like the way that i have positioned the text and image with the image being the centre piece for the receptors eyes to focus on obviously following the title. i think that after all the research i have carried out that it is more succesful and works well for the magazine if you have a good eye catching title and one big main central image that the receptors eye will automatically focus on. overall i feel that the colour scheme that was chosen as a group decision works well, and as i stated previously in my title research, the bright striking green around the black title writing really brings the title to life and futhermore lifts it right off of the page. i decided to stick to this colour scheme throughout the whole front cover producing process as i thought it would work better than if i was to go off the rails colour wise and start using all sorts of different colours, i think magazines can look slightly tacky when not obiding to the same colour scheme throughout the magazine. i used "Q" magazine as my style model and based my whole design around that with the big bold title in the top left corner of the page then following straight from the edge of the title a big central image i done this because as with "Q" magazine the receptors eye flows right from the title onto the image and then onto one of the main attracting stories within the magazine, the only thing that i went against the conventions of "Q" magazine was by putting stories surounding the whole central image. the central image fits well with the text surounding it and doesnt overlap any of it which is always a bonus,i went against the usual conventions by rotating the image slightly, i think this gives it a good effect and is different to what you would usually find, another reason for doing so is to jazz up the front cover a little bit and make it look a bit wilder than usual magazines i was trying to get the message accross that this is no ordinary boring magazine. i created this front cover using the programme "pages" on the apple mac monitors.

This pictured is my final contents page that i produced. one of the first things that you may notice with this is that the first bit of text is written in green as apposed to white this is because in "Q" magazine my style model in the contents page the main story was written in a more bold font and just generally larger so that it stands out, this was really what i wanted to achieve as a whole but i didnt want to exactly copy "Q" magazine so i did it in a slightly different way and this was just by simply making the text a different colour as apposed to all the rest of the text. i also decided to make a bit of a habbit of going against the usual conventions on this contents page i done this by placing the page numbers on top of the text explaining what is on the page rather than underneath and after. i stated that i used "Q" magazine as my style model and i did with this contents page, i seen that in "Q" magazine the contents page was only really text and was just really simple as a whole, i decided to keep this the same with my contents page, i really think that i have justified this and i didnt want to bundle the heads of the receptors with irrelevant information that need not to be placed on the page. i have only placed information that is needed on this page. i decided to rotate the "contents" text to also go against the usual conventions. i also created this contents page of mine through the programme called "pages" on the apple mac monitors.

This is my two page spread from my strings issue that i also created on the programme named "pages" on the apple mac monitors. again with this two page spread on the world tour of the band random gender i decidedto also stick with the same colour scheme all the way throughout i thought that a good effective eye catching double page spread would be produced if i used a sort of alternating colour scheme on these pages however still only usiong the three main colours of bright green, bright pink and black. again as with the contents page that i produced i decided to keep it simple again basing it on my style model of "Q" magazine i didnt want to boggle the readers head with information that is completely irrelavent and not needed, i think i have justified the simpleness of this page spread aswell as with the contents page.

initial design process

This pictured on the left was our initial design ideas where we just decided to have a little play about on paper trying to decide as a group on what title we should have on our magazine issues, what made the decision on main title to use even harder was that it had to fit in with our target audience so we began writing down a variety of different titles we could possibly use until we came across one of them that sounded catchy to appeal to our target audience. the title we eventually chose as a group and drew a conclusion at was the title of "strings" we chose this because the design we put on paper looked as if it would be easy to recreate on the computer screen obviously as this was the initial design of the title as a whole and not too much focus going into the design at this moment in time there were still alterations to be made with how the title is structured and what font should be used to look most effective on the magazine front cover and how it will fit on the magazine and what position it will be better to be in on the magazine cover.

our next stage after we decided on the title name of "strings" was to get other pieces of paper and then elaborate on the design ideas for this title . this was a very challenging thing to do to choose a design from this as all the designs and layouts of the title were similar and we had to try and pick one that we knew would be simple enough to create on the apple mac

computers and not something that would be too complicated to remeber or create, plus we wanted a simple design so it didnt make the title page so busy and cluttered up, we thought that it would be better to have something simple to design and simple on the cover page as it will be not so much for the receptors eye to take in, we also thought that if we had a bigger simple title that it would be more eye catching to the receptor rather than a smaller complex design that the receptor would just glance over the top of it and not really take into account the title and remeber it let alone buy it if it happened to be placed on a shelf.

On the left here is our final design. after a lot of time and effot put into designs and changes made. we all felt that this design was the right one to use and we have no regrets on our decisoin and the final design we came up with in the end, we thought that we had done the best thing by using the bright green outline round the edge of the title as the title lays on a black background it stands out so much more and is more eye catching to the receptor and much more of an effective title because of this.

Title Research

My next stage in the research i carried out was to choose a title to use on the front cover of my magazine. we needed to come up with a name that would be well suited to the genre that we had chosen which was "electric indie" and also appeal to the target audience that we had aimed at. we finally came to a decision on the name of "strings" as we thought it sounded catchy and suited to the target audience and genre we have chosen. the other initial title ideas that we wrote down we could not somehow see them on the front cover of a magazine.

The next stage in the title process was to jazz up this title and make it look appealing to the target audience. we figured as it is for a mixed gender we would use both more feminine and masculine colours being the bright pink and the bright green

My initial stages of this project was to carry out research on different types of music magazines. This was to view and compare the different layouts and fonts used on the magazines and how they contrast in with the pictures on there. I found a variety of different music magazines and annotated them pointing out things that i like on them and things that i didnt like so much or what i thought did not work all that well.
























The "Q" logo is very clearly displayed, i think it is very effective the way that the logo is big and bright meaning it is immediately eye catching, the left corner is the first thing that the receptors eyes fix on due to the brightness of the logo then the receptors eyes follow the image as the layout is set clever like that.

I like the way that all of the main stories are all set out in one corner as it looks more snappy and neat all in one place although it doesn't make the receptor look around the whole page to find out all the main stories meaning their eyes wont view the whole page, possibly meaning the magazine may not sale.

The image is used for a specific reason i think mainly aimed at males of around late teens as the picture is of a famous young lady with her top removed which happens to be appealing catering to the main target audience of male teenagers. The main article is written in a sort of "devilish" font and the red colour used on the word "wicked" implies a kind of sinfulness about it.

The strap lines are situated around the central image which is Lily Allen who happens to be the main selling point of this magazine. as the central image is planted right in the centre of the magazine and everything is shaped around the central image so the receptors eyes cover the whole magazine cover.