Front Cover - Analysis

Media Magz

Production Log #2

I now have completed the Preliminary Tasks and I am now moving on to the Research. I will have to do research on front cover,content and double page spreads and analyse them, this will give me a good understanding of how music magazine look and feel. I will also have to understand and explain the codes and conventions for a music magazine (front cover,contents and double page spreads). I will also have to get existing masthead and names and analyse them. I feel that the most important research part is the Audience and Institution research, I say this as I feel I should focus on these areas if I want to maintain the professional look for my magazine, for example if I didn't add an institution the magazine would look fake.

Preliminary Task - Magazine Front Cover & Contents Page

Finished Magazine - Front Cover and Contents Page

During the first two weeks we were set a task to design a magazine for the students of Haydon High School. We were told to create a front cover and content page for the magazine. I chose to add interesting articles in the magazine as it would be more likely for a student to buy it. Therefore they would want to know the updates, puzzles, competitions and things to help them through school life. Our first task was to draw an initial design on paper and figure out where the main image will be placed, what type of font and size we will be using, also the magazine titles, sub headings and taglines also not forgetting bar code and price will be on the magazine. By doing the initial plan I was able to think of the photos I wanted to use for the front cover and what location the photo would be placed. After doing the initial front cover and contents page I began creating it on Photoshop.                           

I finally decided to have a photo of a 6^th former on the front leaning on her brand new car. The student has a huge smile on her face to represent her happiness and the joy about her first car . I got her too lean on her car so when people look at the photo they instantly know its something to do with the girl and the car. The title of the magazine will be in the font “Impact” and I will have fonts around the front cover to give sell lines such as “Haydon Competitions”. I used the Haydons stags logo colours as the main colours for my front cover and then added another natural colour (blue, yellow, white).

For the contents page I had to think what content would be interesting for all years which was a very hard challenge but I did a mini survey and found out what people found more interesting, the survey was done by both year 7 s and year 13s. Overall I listened to the results of the students and came to a conclusion simple but interesting. I also used an image of GCSEs results, basically the photo had four students jumping and all of them had a smile. This photo illustrated there happiness from there results. By taking a photo like this the lower students can take inspirations and thing if there happy with there results I want to be happy with mine, thus making the student strive for successes  This photo was placed at the bottom of the contents page. I still wanted simple as a theme in my magazine so I kept the background bare, just white, I added a grey scale “Contents” title in the same font Impact.

I produced the magazine cover and contents page on Photoshop and used a variety of tools including:

-Cropping – to crop parts of the photo which I didn't want.

-Text – titles, subheadings

-Drop Shadows – used for the headings of the contents and front cover.

Also during my production I had changed a few things to make the magazine better, on the front cover I changed the font colour of the tag lines as it seems to distracting to the eye, I also moved the tag lines to fill in spaced in the front cover, this made the magazine more filled. I also added a box for the price as the price was unclear on the magazine.

Production Log #1

I am now beginning my adventure of blogging!