This is a link to an online survey page, this survey will help me gather information about the readers opinions for the magazine and their current likes and interests. As it is online it allows it to be spread much more easily and to a wider range of people and can be spread to social network sites where the people using them will be a similar age to the target marker of the readers to will be give more useful feedback.
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Here i have taken the results from my survey and used them to gather key information about the target market. Having this information i was then able to make decisions about my magazine to suite them as if it follows what they like it should allow them to have more interest in the magazine. This was a first sketch of the idea I had for my cover image. I was able to plan out my ideas and show the reasonin behind them, I could then show the person in the photo a more clear idea of what I wanted and the message I wanted it to have. This is a flat plan of my cover for my magazine, this should allow me to have rough idea of where elements should be going when creating my final cover. This has helped as i have been able to try different layouts in a much quicker way. I now have a guide of what needs to be included and where it should be looking to go, if at some point this layout doesn't work in an area I may rearrange a small part to help the quality of the final cover look better.
These are a few masthead ideas that i came up with all having attributes that linked into the sub-genre of dance music. I then chose the final design i wanted to use and wrote about why i chose this and the things i thought it represented.
Here are some defintions that are involved in magazines, these are words that are used throughout my project and have to be understood to produce accurate work;
Genre; This is a basic style or category of music, literature or art. In magazines examples may be Sport Magazines or alternatively Music Magazines (e.g. NME) Sub-Genre; A subdivision of these basic categories, they are then split into smaller sub-categoies. Some sub-genres of music magazines may be Indie Music Magazine (e.g. Q) or Dance Music Magazines (e.g. Mixmag) Hybrid-Genre; A cross genre mixes and merges multiple genres or elements to create a unique mix of two. An example would be a mix of music/sport or music/fashion. These are the possible images i had for the cover of my magazine, i looked through them all and looked at the features they all had and made a choice of a possible 3. I then chose the final image i was going to use, this one had the best framing,negative space and fit into my sub-genre the best.
Here i gained peer feedback on my inital design of my cover, it was still in progress but this gave me some good indications for improvement at an early stage. Using this i was able to improve the quality of my cover from the start, i used this and from it i took that i needed to increase the size of my image and add more pugs/banners, i then did this and it helped my overall l
This was my final magazine cover draft which i felt fit the sub-genre well and followed the coventions a typical magazine follows. I improved this from the first draft by using the feedback i recieved, for example i enlarged the image and made it slightly brighter which was suggested to me in the feedback. Also the audience research came into place here as i used it to make decisions on certain aspects of the magazine like; monthly issues, choosing tickets as a prize, the price, title of my magazine and the colour scheme.
Here is a flat plan of my contents page, this is a rough idea of what i intend the layout of my final contents page to be like. This has allowed me to test multiple layouts and choose one without having to fully design them all. I have now got a base i can work from so i know what needs to be included and where abouts i should be looking to put it. If this layout doesnt work in certain areas i will change it but only if it makes the quality of the final design better.
On this contact sheet i have gathered my own images that could be used for my magazine contents page, putting them all on one open page allowed me to view and compare them all at once. They also allowed me to get more of an idea of what the combinations of images on the same page would look like. I then selected the images i knew i wanted to use on my contents page taking into consideration the articles i wanted featured on this page.
Here i have my draft of my contents page with a feedback sheet showing the feedback that was received for my draft. This then helped me gain somebodies opinion on the page and brought my attention to the areas that could be changed to improve the page and also helped me see what i was doing well so i could keep consistent with it.
This is the final draft of my contents page, I used the feedback response to alter the image , for example I added the pug in the top corner as suggested. I also slightly altered positions of text, page numbers, lines just to get a slightly more accurate alignment of things which allowed a finished design.
This was a rough plan for my double page spread it showed the different sorts of ideas I had for the contents of the article and the order I wanted them to appear in. I thought about the style of the article and the stars personality and how I wanted him to come across to the reader. I then also produced questions that would fit into the content of the article. I then started a flat plan and created a rough idea of the positioning for the different features in the design. Here I used my DPS plan to create a draft of my article and wrote up what I wanted the content to be in my spread. I used the plan what each paragraph would contain and to remind myself of the style I wanted the overall article to be like and also how I wanted the artist to appear. This will then go into the column and stand first area I have planned for in my flat plan. These are two draft forms of my double page spread, these show the progression of my DPS. Between these and my final double page spread I received feedback and made changes accordingly to increase the quality of my work. Before making this my final design I know I want to add a few more conventions such as a pull quote on the main image and a by line for the article.
This is my final design for my double page spread, this had been added too since my previous draft because of consequent feedback and ideas of my own that I wanted to use. I had added a yellow colour into the house style of the article and also added more conventions like I wanted too such as the pull quote for on the main image. By the time it was finished I felt it followed a good consistent style with my other products as well as having a clean design and following the key conventions of pre-existing double page spreads.
Once i had completed my cover i took it and put it alongside another currently existing dance magazine cover. I then used this to compare similarities and differences, i could then see how well my magazine cover had matched to the conventions of other magazines and if i had taken the right decisions to make it fit well into the stereotypical dance magazine cover. Overall i was happy with how my cover compared to the real one as it followed some of the important convemtions showed clear features that represented its sub-genre and also had extra conventions that the real one didnt.
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