MAGAZINE DESIGN

EVALUATIONBy Sam Hill

INITIAL RESEARCH

At the start of my project I began to look into different music magazines. I compared different magazines to see what was similar and what was different. I had to think about why each magazine looked the way it did and how they made it appealing to their target audience.

I then created a questionnaire that I then gave out to the people around college, as they would be my target audience. I found that the majority of students where in to rock music and preferred to use the internet than read. This would be a problem if I was going to sell my magazine.

LOGO DESIGN

Using DaFont I looked at possible fonts I would use for my logo. I chose ‘The Rock’ as my title as it was simple and sums up the content of the magazine, rock music. I came up with various style which I then had to pick one from. At the start of my search for a logo I was looking for something rough and not to formal. Once I found what I created the logo that I wanted. I made this in Illustrator, where I added a guitar and microphone. Once I started making the magazine I found that because the logo was so tall it wouldn’t fit at the top of the page, so I started again and found a plain logo which was more flexible with what I was making.

MAGAZINE COVER

When making my magazine cover I had to pick one of many photos from my photo shoot. Once I had chosen my final image I made the image black and white as the photo wasn’t very clear. This give it an old camera effect which I think works well as the front cover. After, I copied the image and began to cut round the person using the magic wand tool, to get rid of the un-wanted part of the image. I planned to put the logo behind the person but in-front of the background. Once the background was finished I began to add cover lines and main sells. I also added the date and issue number in the top right hand corner. Finally I added a barcode in the bottom left hand corner.

CONTENTS PAGE

For my contents page I did a similar method to my front cover. I started by choosing two photos from the photos shoot and then I used the magic wand tool to go round each photo. I then made them smaller and but them both in in opposite corners. Once this was done I chose to make the background a dark blue and add black rectangles where I would but text and titles. I began to add text to the contents page keeping the house style of font. I decided to layer the images in the contents so that the photos where behind the text.

DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD

For my double page spread I decided to keep the same colour background and keep the black rectangle behind the title. The font was also kept the same to keep to the house style. I wrote the article in Microsoft Word and then copied and pasted it into to the Photoshop document. I put the text into columns just like the magazines I have looked into.

I decided that I would add three images to this double page spread, so I picked 3 photos and edited them all in the same way. I decided to use the patch work filter which give it an old style coloured photo look. This also hid the problem with the blur. Then I created a black box and layered it behind each photo so they would stand out and it would give each photo a nice clean frame.

STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE PROJECT

Strengths Weaknesses

• I have kept to a house style throughout the magazine

• I took a good amount of photos so I had many to choose from

• The photos I have taken were very blurry, but I tried to make up for it by editing them

• I struggled to fit text on to the double page spread, so I should think about the orientation and the amount of text next time.