First Draft of Double Page Spread for Music Magazine

Contents Page So Far...

This is my finished contents page so far, and, as seen, I still have work to do on it. I will continue editing my contents page so that it can look as good as it can, as well as editing my front cover.

Contents Page Production 2

This was the second part of the production of my contents page. For this, I added some 'Cover Stories' to the picture of my model, Helena, as I believed that they fitted in to the left of that picture nicely. I stuck to the fonts that I had previously mentioned in my last post, as well as keeping the colour scheme of mainly mustard and white. When my model is wearing different coloured clothes in any other photos I decide to either put onto my contents page or include into my double page spread, I may have to change the colour of the fonts so that they fit better with what my model is wearing.

Contents Page Production #1

This was the first step in the production of my contents page, and, to start with, I decided upon choosing a totally different text for my title. Once I had chosen the text, called 'Park Lane' from dafont.com, I decided that I did like this font better than the one I had originally used on my front cover, so I have decided to, when I start editing my front cover to make it a more vintage style, use that font so it fits with my genre more than the current one does. I have also found 2 other texts from dafont.com that I think fit with the vintage theme much more, and these are 'Bellrose' and 'Fotnleroy Brown', which I thought looked more vintage than the others that I used. After this, I added another photo of Helena from more pictures that I took; I edited the colouring on ipiccy.com so that the colouring looked more vintage - I added more blue and golden tones than bright green style tones so that it fitted into my style more. I then played around with the area I wanted to put my picture in, and then I decided that I would base it on a Vogue magazine contents page that usually situate's its pictures to the top left.

Contents Page Conventions

There are a number of conventions on a contents page, and the main ones are: - Page title at the top of the page with the date of the issue - Quotes from various articles - 'Features' section - Images from various articles - Continuous colour scheme throughout - Images of artists both performing and on a set - Page number giving reference to location of articles, with the name of the articles - Large, clear font - Few external advertisements from other institutions on the contents page - Various language techniques These main conventions have been demonstrated in the following contents pages from popular magazines:

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.