Final Music Magazine Front Cover

Evaluation - Music Magazine Front Cover

From completing this task, I have learnt a lot of new skills, particularly when it comes to creating a well structured, professional magazine. This includes doing things like research into existing magazines, as well as physically creating the magazine until it looks as good as it possibly could. Photoshop has also taught me how to create new layers via copy, as, since learning this, I have been using it quite a lot when it comes to me screen shotting text from the internet, as I used texts from font websites like Da Font and Cool Text. In creating my magazine cover, the main form of technology I have used has been the Apple Macs and computers in Oak 55. The main program I have used on these is Adobe Photoshop, and this has been because Photoshop is able to provide the things and resources I need to make my front cover look well structured and professional. I have also used a Sony camera in taking both my test shots as well as my final pictures, as well as editing them on Pic Monkey and IPiccy. I did research to find out what was generally in a typical magazine, and found that the typical conventions in a magazine are things like the plug, masthead etc. When finding out these, I also evaluated existing magazines, for example NME and Q, and talked about what I liked and disliked about them. I also did research on typical 'mod' makeup and mod hair. All in all I am happy with the way my magazine has turned out, as it has all the typical magazine conventions and also a good colour scheme and it looks attractive. If I were to do this task again, I would probably experiment with different colour schemes, as I think that the sorts of blacks and whites that I have used are quite plain. I would maybe use some brighter colours, for example reds or oranges etc to make it even more eye catching. As well as that, I would also change the layout of my masthead, as my masthead is in quite a typical place; I could change it to be on the left or the right instead of just in the centre. Also, I would maybe edit the picture of my model or even change it completely, for example, instead of my model being sat down, I would take a photo of them standing up, and then edit the background out so that I could put them on a plainer background that would match my colour scheme, for example a plain or white. I would then finally change the text type, as I believe that this is also a bit plain; I would prefer for it to be again a bit more eyecatching and more vibrant.

Test Shots

Before physically creating my music magazine, I took a number of tests shots of my model, Helena, in her makeup and hair that I did myself. I decided upon going with the Twiggy style makeup, as well as a small 60s beehive. I also then dressed Helena in her own yellow dress from the shop Chinese Laundry as it was typical 1960s dress. I then took a number of photos, however I have only included the one's that aren't blurry or have bad hue and saturation.

Magazine Analysis - Front Cover

In this task, we had to find 3 existing magazines of any genre of which we feel the images are successful. We had to state why we liked the images and how they would help influence my own choices. Here, I have chosen 3 front covers that I really like and that stood out to me personally.