My task for my media studies a level work was to create a front cover, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine with the genre of our choice. I chose the genre of alternative rock so I done my research on magazines like ‘Rolling stones’ ‘Q’ and ‘NME’.
1. Print is a typical form of magazine in the media industry. The rock genre magazine had typical conventions in which majority of all magazines portray. Whilst I was researching the magazines I was creating mood boards and analysing the features to get a wider insight into understanding what a good front cover would be to attract my audience. A typical main convention of a magazine is having one main image on the front cover, being a mid shot and being very prominent, my front cover uses this as I have one main woman on the front blowing smoke from her mouth. I chose to have one person symbolising this as I thought it was a typical aspect and the girl had a rocky edge by smoking and wearing a lot of eye make up. For example Amy Winehouse was known for alternative rock at times with her cover work, I chose to try and interpret her. Instead of having a mid shot the woman, I had a close up of her face so that the focus from the audience would be on just her. I also chose to have the name of the artist across her. I found that with experimenting different sides to have it, it fit better in front as it seemed more centre and gave the model the attention too. Having it to the right or the left of the image distracted the audience from looking at the image. I did challenge the typical conventions by not having a background on the front page; I chose to have a full close up of the woman instead. I did this because I wanted my target audience to only look at the woman’s facial features. As she only has one eye showing and we can only see part of her lips, it makes the image more intriguing and so the audience would be interested and pick it up. I chose also to have the black white and red theme. A lot of rock magazines have this and I believed it was the best colour scheme as the all stand out when being on top of each other. The red is a very bold colour and the black, nit being dull, attracts the attention when being on top of white.
2. I chose to have a review placed at the bottom of the page with a whole boxed off section. Normally a typical convention would be just to have the review under a subheading and a list of what the review includes. I chose to develop off of this and section this underneath the main image and story. That way the audience would be drawn into the image and follow the page down. I developed this because I believe that the review is a main part in intriguing audiences as they want to know what is best to spend their money on. They don’t want their time wasted and so I sectioned it off with an image and list and snippets of the articles underneath. I carried on with the black white and red theme as it reminded the audience of what they are reading. In q magazine every page has the q in the corner at the bottom of each page, and is iconic red white and black. I incorporated this into my colour theme with my title and within my page and front cover. I wanted the audience to be able to tell what it is they are reading and to be reminded like the other target audiences. I also chose to follow the conventions of not having all of the page numbers in the column of articles. I tried this in my preliminary task and it looked boring and had didn’t have any life to it. By having a variety of different page numbers I was able to attract the audience into having a selection of different articles’ to look at. Instead of having the whole chronological order, the magazines pick out there most intriguing articles in the contents page to make entice the customer into reading it. I chose to do the same as I thought it was a clever idea.
3. I chose not to have a quote as the title of my double page spread story as I didn’t want it to be following the typical conventions. I wanted to challenge it and so I chose to have a subtitle then the title being the artists’ name. I thought this was more suitable because the article was an interview of the artist. I believed that the best place for a quote was to have it beside the image on one of the sides of the double page spread. Here it would have the reader looking at the image, then at the quote, and with an intriguing quote they would be more engrossed in wanting to read the article. Typically, the drop letter (the letter of the first word of the article) is larger to intrigue the audience into reading the story. The size of the font that then follows this letter is small. This is so that there are more words placed into a compressed space. The image is then a significantly larger scale to the text to keep the reader intrigued in the story. In all of my research in double page spreads, they all include this in font size, drop capitals and image size. I chose to include this rather than challenging it because I saw it as a significant feature to double page spreads. If I had a small image and had a larger scale of text, the readers wouldn’t bother as they wouldn’t be interested in reading 5 columns worth of an interview.
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