Thursday, 28 January 2010

Response to the main task brief.

My initial response to the main task brief was that i wanted to make an r&b style magazine. I done some research on music magazines, to get a better idea of what i had to produce. I found that most music magazines are quite focused on the rock genre, there are very few that are of other genres. So i will take ideas from the designs of other magazines, however i am going to make my magazine more focused on r&b instead of rock.

Name Ideas.

Initial name ideas :

Radar
Vibe
Fusion
Echo
Revelation
Xpose
Toxic
Replay

With these initial name ideas, i asked some people which one they preferred. This helped me to find out what the most popular name would be for my magazine. I found that Radar, Xpose and Vibe were the most popular names. However, although it was my name idea, i thought that Vibe sounded a bit predictable for a music magazine and a bit common. I also felt that Xpose did not really sound like a music magazine. And so the name i chose for my magazine was Radar.

Final photos used in Preliminary task


These are the original unedited photos that i actually used in my preliminary task. The top picture is my front cover image, and the other two are images that i used on my contents page. Obviously on the actual final magazine these pictures have been slightly edited.

Evaluation of Preliminary task.

I have found that doing my preliminary task has helped me a lot with developing skills with photoshop and indesign, and has also given me a much bigger insight into the magazine world. This is good as i am now much more prepared to go and start my main task, producing a music magazine. I think that overall my preliminary task went quite well, and i am quite pleased with the completed look of it. It is quite a simple design, and so i will still need to learn more skills with photoshop for my main task.

Music Magazine Front Covers



Q284


These are all front covers of well known music magazines. From doing research on many different front covers, i found that generally, there is a main image of an artist or band that are featured in the magazine, and then there is writing all around that image telling people what else is featuring in the magazine. There is not very often other images as well as the main image. This is a convention of a magazine front cover. Also by looking at all the different front covers, i found that the main image is the probably the most important part of the front cover, as that is what instantly attracts readers to the magazine. The front cover is what turns a potential buyer into a paying customer. As well as this, the main image is also what shapes the rest of the front cover, as writing goes around it and colors are extracted from it to give the front cover the color scheme.