Evaluation of magazine

Kelly Whitehurst

Evaluation of Music Magazine

The brief for this coursework was to make an original music magazine that includes at least four original images.  For this piece of work I had to make a front cover, contents page and a double page spread. Whilst doing this piece of work I looked at different types of music magazines and the different conventions and genre’s of music. I chose Pop as the genre I wish to study, to help me fulfil what I needed to do I analysed three Music Magazines which where X Factor which was published by Fremantle media, XXL published by Harris publications and finally NME which is published by IPC media. I looked at XXL and NME because they weren’t many Pop magazines which I could look at so by doing XXL and NME I felt they would have been the closest to Pop instead of doing The Metal Hammer magazine which would have being the total opposite to what I wish to achieve. I made plans of how I wanted my own music magazine to look like I drew them and also planed them out using Microsoft Publisher to get a good draft of what I wanted my magazine to look like.

I decided that my magazine would be targeted at people from the ages of 10 to 18 and maybe even beyond depending on people’s choice of music. The genre I chose for my magazine was Pop. Because my magazine was going to be targeted a rather young age I had to choose my images and text carefully to make sure it was a good representation to people of young ages. My music magazine uses conventions of real media products such as; I have a barcode on my magazine front cover, a price and an issue number by having these I was making my product more real to life, because these are the conventions a normal music magazine would have. I used a running theme though my magazine with the same colours and photos running though. On my front cover the colours where Yellow, Green and Red. The Colours on my contents page are Black, Yellow, Green and Red. On my double page spread the colour scheme was different to the front cover and contents page, but I found that the colours still flow because they are bright; I used bright pink and white. I chose my font colour wisely because I wanted the colours to attract the audience and I wanted it to reflect my music genre. All the images on my magazine are original images.  I thought carefully about my front cover images so that I could put text around the photo and a masthead above in total I had three different photos for my front cover, the final cover I felt worked the best because it is fun, girly and she is looking straight at the audience. The images on my double page spread where hard to do because I couldn’t take photos that went across two pages because of the fold in the middle of the page. Because of this I chose to have to strips of different images at either side of the fold with the text on either side of the page. I used the same font for my text on the front cover, contents page and double page spread the text was Arial. I chose this font because I thought that it is legible but yet quite poppy. I felt that my contents page had the conventions of a real music magazine by the variation of text and images, and in the left corner of my contents page there was a little photo of my font cover I chose to do this because I saw it on many other contents pages and I wished to make my magazine have the best magazine conventions as I could.  

I had to do three different music magazine front covers. I did this because I didn’t feel that they really worked with the conventions I was going for and that it could be highly improved. My first font cover was rushed and not thought through, it was two girls dressed up and stood to one side of the shot, but the text was hard to place on the image and even when I had done the text it didn’t look like a magazine front cover. The text I used had serifs on the end of the letters so it’s connotations were very old fashioned and not the look I was going for, it wouldn’t fit in the genre of pop. My second front cover was a medium close up of just one girl. I could then put text all around her head and a masthead above her head, but the model was not making eye contact with the camera therefore I didn’t feel like the magazine would really connect with the audience. The text on my second front cover was similar to the text on my first front cover I have the same reasons for changing the text which was because of the serifs. Finally, on my final front cover I have a close up shot of the same girl on my second front cover pulling a funny face, I felt this worked best with my genre pop because pop is meant to be happy, exciting and a little rebellious. The text I used for this front cover I felt worked well, it was plain and simple and straight to the point. The colours were bright and vibrant which made the front cover stand out. The masthead I chose also changed from BLISS which was the first magazine masthead, to GLOW which is the second and final magazine masthead. I chose to change the name of my magazine because I felt BLISS could also be seen as an r ‘n’ b masthead name and I wanted the audience to be able to look straight at the magazine and think ‘yeah this is a pop magazine’. Not only did I do this though the title but I thought by the colours I chose to use this made you realise that my magazine is a pop magazine, because of the brightness a rock magazine wouldn’t have bright yellow and green on the front cover. My double page spread is also bright and stands which I chose to do so that it would flow with the rest of the magazine. I used the same font for ‘RUBY RED’ on the front cover to introduce her, and the masthead on the double page spread. I did this so that you would have some continuity within the front cover and the double page spread.

The institution that I feel my music magazine would be mainstream and fit under would be the same institution as the XXL magazine published by Harris publications, because they don’t have a pop magazine under this publication. The reason I wouldn’t chose Fremantle Media is because X factor magazine is within that publication and these magazine’s would be rivals.

For my music magazine I got some audience feed back which was a mix of qualitative date and quantitative data. I used a questionnaire format and gave them to 10 different people a mixture of boys and girls. All of the people that did my questionnaire said that the genre of my magazine was Pop which is good it shows that the connotations I used to try and make my magazine look this way worked. The reason people chose this was because of the funny photo on the front cover and the photos on the double page spread and the bright colours on all three pages. The average voting for my front cover was 7  people chose this because they liked the choice of imagery and colour scheme. Although, some people said it would have worked better if I thought about a different masthead. The majority of the feed back to get for my contents page wasn’t very good, because it looked more like a poster and not a magazine contents page which I could work on to make this better. The audience feed back I got for my double page spread was good the average people said that it would be an 8. Because the choice of questions and answers, the colours and the photos. People liked the questions and answers because they don’t like reading lots of text so by doing this it makes the double page look more formal and tidy.

While I was making this music magazine I have learnt a lot of things. For example, I have learnt about different music institutions such as, IPC and Bauer Media Group.  Secondly I learnt how to analyse magazines by looking at the Language, Institution, Audience and the Representation of the product. By doing this piece of work I have had to take some of my own original images which taught me things like choosing the correct scene that would fit with the image I wished to take, also getting a good enough camera to take good quality photos. Looking back on my preliminary task where I had to make a college magazine I have learnt a lot from then. I knew whilst doing that magazine that I needed to follow the audience I was aiming for and good representation that a college would wish to have. The main thing that I have learnt the most doing my preliminary task and my music magazine was how to work Photoshop, before I started doing media I didn’t have a clue about Photoshop I had never been on it in my life, now I feel happy creating my own pieces of work though Photoshop and feel that it is a fantastic skill I have learnt to do.

My final music magazine looks like this: