Above is the front cover of my music magazine along with an example of a magazine that helped guide me, NME.
My music magazine was based on the Independent music genre, however to make my magazine stand out I wanted to put a twist on it, to achieve this I made the genre of my magazine main stream indie; Ellie Goulding and artists like this are examples of main stream indie.
After researching NME, I decided to keep my magazine less busy and more minimal but not as minimal as other magazines I looked at, Indie is an example of this. In this I was challenging the normal media conventions, as I wanted something that had not yet been created in the magazine industry; I used a variety of fonts but separated them out so they were more evenly spaced, this made the cover look less busy and more minimal without it looking boring or over crowded.
From the research I did of NME, I found many factors of their products that I liked and decided to bring into my product; one of these factors was in the contents page, NME included a weekly alphabetically ordered list of the bands included in that current issue, I decided to bring this aspect across to my contents page as I thought it helped the reader to understand the magazine in more detail and helped them to focus in on what they were looking for.
I wanted the cover to look colourful, to grab the audiences attention, but I didn't want to over power the cover with too many colours that clashed; so I used the idea of a fixed colour pallet with colours that all worked well together. I think a lot of different magazines do this, and it helps to make each one stand out; this also helped my magazine to promote the main stories, for example the bright red font was used for the main Ellie Goulding story compared to the white font promoting Two Door Cinema Club, I think this was an effective idea as you can see NME magazine also uses this, with the main white font highlighing the Pete Doherty story.
The main picture is Ellie Goulding (Lydia was used to model) however because of the lack of equipment, I didn't have anything to use as a solid background, this made my magazine feel less proffesional as I had to use photoShop to cut the picture out and place it on a background on Adobe Illustrator. Ideally, if I did have the equipment then I wouldn't have to cut the image out on software but use the photo as it was. Howevef I did get to edit the photo on PhotoShop which meant I could make the image vibrant, and make the picture stand out.
After focusing on NME magazine, I decided to use a range of different fonts on the cover to make it more interesting and to highlight certain stories, however by using this technique, theirs a risk of over doing the cover and scaring the audience away because theirs just too much going on to focus on one thing. Therefore I kept to four different fonts that ranged depending on the type of story, for example I used a bigger, bolder font for the Ellie Goulding story when compared to a smaller, thinner font for the Reading and Leeds festival update. This is a technique influenced by NME and other less music orientated magazines, like Look.
My double page was influenced by NME in a few ways, however the point of creating a magazine was to create your own style and I tried to achieve this. The main way I achieved this was by using a specific colour of purple through out my magazine on the cover, contents page and double page spread; I used the purple to highlight specific points and titles, for example to make the band index, influenced by NME, clear I but a purple background behind every other band name with a white font. This seperated the whole block for my contents page and added a vibrance that other contents pages didnt achieve.
The magazine Kerrange incorperates a letter from the public into their contents page every week and I thought this was a really good idea to help show the audience that they have a say on what goes into the magazine; therefore I took influence from this and added my own twist on it by putting a picture of the writter next to the letter, the picture was slightly rotated to give it a vintage, worn look which I thought looked really good; I added a box around this to seperate each piece from the other.
Apart from the picutre of the audience who wrote in, I decided not to include anymore images in the contents page as I wanted to guide the audience as much as possible and keep a simple look which was fresh compared to the cover.
My double page spread was based on the Ellie Goulding story, I wanted to keep my spread simple and clearly laid out for the audience to follow; to achieve this I had to play around with where the title, image and text would go to make the text easy to follow through without getting confused like some other double page spreads. I think my double page is different to a lot of other magazines as it is a lot less busy, compared to magazines like NME and Kerrang; this made my magazine stand out and go against the "norm", challenge what everyone has to offer.
I kept to the purple colour palete with white font when the background of the font was purple, this made the questions really stand out and made it a lot easier to follow the whole story which I thought was a really good, unique idea.
To keep that vintage, worn look I framed the picture so it looked like it was taken in a polaroid camera; this was a good idea I thought as again not many other magazines had done that, and it made the picture (Ellie/Lydia) look more relaxed and like a real double page spread.
The main picture is Ellie Goulding (Lydia was used to model) however because of the lack of equipment, I didn't have anything to use as a solid background, this made my magazine feel less proffesional as I had to use photoShop to cut the picture out and place it on a background on Adobe Illustrator. Ideally, if I did have the equipment then I wouldn't have to cut the image out on software but use the photo as it was. Howevef I did get to edit the photo on PhotoShop which meant I could make the image vibrant, and make the picture stand out.
After focusing on NME magazine, I decided to use a range of different fonts on the cover to make it more interesting and to highlight certain stories, however by using this technique, theirs a risk of over doing the cover and scaring the audience away because theirs just too much going on to focus on one thing. Therefore I kept to four different fonts that ranged depending on the type of story, for example I used a bigger, bolder font for the Ellie Goulding story when compared to a smaller, thinner font for the Reading and Leeds festival update. This is a technique influenced by NME and other less music orientated magazines, like Look.
My double page was influenced by NME in a few ways, however the point of creating a magazine was to create your own style and I tried to achieve this. The main way I achieved this was by using a specific colour of purple through out my magazine on the cover, contents page and double page spread; I used the purple to highlight specific points and titles, for example to make the band index, influenced by NME, clear I but a purple background behind every other band name with a white font. This seperated the whole block for my contents page and added a vibrance that other contents pages didnt achieve.
The magazine Kerrange incorperates a letter from the public into their contents page every week and I thought this was a really good idea to help show the audience that they have a say on what goes into the magazine; therefore I took influence from this and added my own twist on it by putting a picture of the writter next to the letter, the picture was slightly rotated to give it a vintage, worn look which I thought looked really good; I added a box around this to seperate each piece from the other.
Apart from the picutre of the audience who wrote in, I decided not to include anymore images in the contents page as I wanted to guide the audience as much as possible and keep a simple look which was fresh compared to the cover.
My double page spread was based on the Ellie Goulding story, I wanted to keep my spread simple and clearly laid out for the audience to follow; to achieve this I had to play around with where the title, image and text would go to make the text easy to follow through without getting confused like some other double page spreads. I think my double page is different to a lot of other magazines as it is a lot less busy, compared to magazines like NME and Kerrang; this made my magazine stand out and go against the "norm", challenge what everyone has to offer.
I kept to the purple colour palete with white font when the background of the font was purple, this made the questions really stand out and made it a lot easier to follow the whole story which I thought was a really good, unique idea.
To keep that vintage, worn look I framed the picture so it looked like it was taken in a polaroid camera; this was a good idea I thought as again not many other magazines had done that, and it made the picture (Ellie/Lydia) look more relaxed and like a real double page spread.
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