The Conventions of Music Magazines

I have analysed the front cover of 'Billboard' music magazine to show that I have learnt the conventions of a music magazine. I chose to use this front cover because the magazine has a lot of chart music in it, and I feel it relates to the magazine I am going to make.

Feedback 24.11.09

Good work Lauren. Good prelim and refelction. You now need to get stuck into the research. You need to be doing this at home in your own time also. You need to outliner the conventions of magazines and upload and analyse a front pg, contents and dble pg feature from a magazine of similar genre to your intended product. Discuss how genre is suggested through the media language and how it attracts the target audience etc. Inclede relevant theory - AIDA, Maslow, Uses and Gratifications etc. See checklist for more.

Mrs A

Preliminary Task

This is the college magazine cover that I have done for my preliminary task. I chose the colour scheme blue and orange to match the St Mary's logo and also I feel that these colours will appeal to both boy and girl students, so more people would buy the magazine rather than only targeting a small group of people. As well as using the St Mary's logo and colour scheme I have also used the initials, 'SMC' in the magazine name. This is because I think it gives the magazine an identity that the target audience will recognise easily. I have used a masthead so that it is clear straight away that this is a magazine, and I think that because the masthead is bright orange on top of dark blue it is eye catching and likely to make people stop and read it. I used a strapline on my magazine cover to give the reader an idea of what the magazine will include. However I have kept it short so it doesn't give too much away. I think this will make the readers want to find out more. One thing I was quite worried about when I was making my magazine was cutting out my image for the front page on Photoshop as I didn't think I would be able to make it look professional. But I think that I did quite well with this and that the image fits well on my front page, and doesn't look like it has been cut out.

Although I am quite happy with the result there are a few things I would change if I could do the task again. I think that the colours of my magazine cover could have been more striking, so it would catch the target audience's eye. As the magazine is aimed at students, I think they might find the dark colours a little bit boring and brighter colours could have been more exciting, so I will consider this when making my music magazine cover. I also think that there may be a bit too much empty space on the front cover, and when I was making it I had trouble thinking how I could fill it without making the page look crowded. I think I could have solved this by planning out my layout properly before choosing my image for the front page, so that I could make sure it would look good. If I could do the magazine again I would also vary the font more, because I realise that it looks a little bit repetitive and not enough variety. 

This is the design I made for my contents page of the college magazine. I like the title 'This month...' rather than just writing 'contents' because I think it gives a more relaxed and informal feel to the magazine. However I was not too happy with the layout, because I do not think it looks very interesting with just the page numbers written down one side, and pictures on the other. I will make sure I think about this when I am making my contents page for my music magazine.After this task I feel a lot more confident using Indesign and Photoshop, because before this I didn't know much about either of those programs. This has helped me a lot with my final project because I have had to think a lot about what would appeal to students, and in my music magazine I will probably be targeting the same age range.

 

Initial ideas for my project.

For my AS media coursework I have decided to do the print option, making a music magazine. I will be doing this project on my own. The genre of my music magazine will be chart music. I have decided to do this because I feel that chart music is the genre I know most about, so I will enjoy it. The audience I have decided to target with my magazine are teenage males and females, between about fourteen and seventeen, because I think they will be interested in chart music so they are most likely to want to consume my product. I will carry out research by analyzing chart music magazines and carrying out a questionnaire on teenage males and females to decide how to target this audience.