Evaluation

Evaluation

I have purposely made my music magazine to both follow the same palette of colour and try to follow the same genre conventions as MOJO and constantly change the way the audience thinks due to subtle design techniques and looking at the connotations of colours. I think it was vital that I constantly referenced the MOJO magazine for design conventions. I followed this and added some of my own inspiration such as the snow due to the white colour having connotations of innocence; originality (the new age of rock and roll) and finally the feel of being in winter as this was the December issue. I liked the idea of my model (see left) to be stood in portrait position with a direct mode of address as it created a direct line between the reader and the picture thus making an eye catching effect, I also wanted my Model to wear a floral shirt as it was indexical hint towards him being famous and more of a classic rock as it is unusual and very retro to suit the target audience.  I took the same masthead from the front cover to create an ongoing theme.  After double checking the contents I realized I should reduce the size of the masthead and create a smaller one to make it look less distracting so that I could lead the reader’s eye more effectively. I finally took the decision to remove the orange text and swap it for a more bold and simplistic scheme. I adjusted this to keep the reader’s attention and to stick with the same theme as MOJO. Finally after debating what was missing, I researched a couple of magazine and noticed they all had a small quotation from one of the articles at the bottom of the contents so I tried this idea and it just seemed to fit perfectly and make a good match to other magazines of the same genre.

Finally after sorting out the contents and the front cover I moved on to the double paged spread. I think due to the technological advances and the advances in camera’s this was made much easier as not only did the picture have much better quality than it would of done 20 years ago, it was also quite an easy task to edit it as with the invention of Photoshop (photo editing software) although the technical side of this was quite easy, this in my opinion was one of the hardest articles to recreate in a professional way, as it had so many different house styles and themes due to the theme recreating what was mentioned in the article and reflected both in themes. For this I decided to take the picture first of all and base the theme around the picture. In this case Patrick Quinn and Jack Bowler did a shooting pose in a direct mode of adress so I decided to create an article about a ‘Rock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’. I thought this was both a clever pun and quite a cool sounding festival name. Because of this I realized I needed quite a gritty backdrop for the article so decided take a picture of a wall and then de-saturated it to create a brick wall that looked extremely effective except I had trouble reading the words. I finally decided to adjust the contrast so that the extremely black areas became white and grey. I re-inserted this picture into In-Design and it worked perfectly with the ‘Rock, Stock’ title and black and white picture with the colour highlights of the models. I personally found that this effect (although looking better than the others) still didn’t suit the magazine style. After a few modifications I could rectify this error and had to leave it. Unfortunately I didn’t ever find something that would look more relevant or effective in this space and decided to give up on looking.

I used the front covers from my mood board to see essentially what attracts readers to the magazine. After a bit of research it turns out that there isn’t something specific that creates a retro genre and (some) of the new music. Just specifically the majority of the band members tend to be ‘eccentric’ such as Seasick Steve, Ringo Starr and Keith Moon. They all had something specific about their nature. I wanted to emphasis this in my front cover and decided to suit one person up, give a hooded jumper to the next and gave a black jacket to the next. This was done to mimic the classic “abbey road” symbolic meanings and clothes, I challeneged and developed from the Abbey Road album cover from the Beatles. I wanted to add my monochrome to challenge this idea, and add metaphorical value by saying that with the monochrome effect everybody is equal. I loved the way it looked in the white snow and decided to use the rule of thirds in the photo to make it both lead your eye and follow the pattern of MOJO central images. I also decided to do the majority of the photos in black and white to appeal to the social group (mainly 30-50 year olds). I also liked the way it made the photo’s seem both poignant and allowed the reader to feel as though they were back in the time period.

I took a step back from the photo’s to examine what they looked like in comparison to the MOJO magazine. I was quite pleased with the results as they both looked as though they could be from the same magazine. As people that read MOJO was my target audience I was extremely pleased and dedicated myself into making them look as though they were inspired from the same sort of genre. I [personally put myself in the same market despite being a lot younger than the target audience as I love ‘old’ music. I loved the idea’s related to these and like the idea of still nowadays scouting for a few bands that can bring back feelings of the past so I thought I was perfectly suited to making this magazine instead of any others. Finally I tried to edit the magazine to keep a constant theme of rock and roll retro to follow the conventions of MOJO and stick to the same mature feeling magazine.

At first I explored some of the magazine distributers such as ‘Music Magazines Inc’ and ‘Bauer’ but I noticed that Bauer already had a retro music magazine and ‘MM’ also had a Beatles magazine but not much apart from that, that focused on retro elements of the music industry. At first I initially thought I would try to get it published by Bauer as it is a multi-million making company. But after a bit of research, they have a huge amount of feedback for MOJO and a huge customer response. So I decided to change this and would aim more towards ‘MM’ as they had a much smaller subscription based customer spectrum. This would be better as I would be allowed to tailor the content directly for the consumer. It would also be great as you would be allowed to add various free CD’s as you know you’re going to have a constant 12 month period of payments ensuring the consumer only bought your magazine. On the other hand Bauer still would have been a good choice as it might be a less constant income of payments but released on a much wider scale.

I made my magazine represent more mature music social group, this means that there isn’t a specific audience I was targeting . I did this purely as I had quite a lot of knowledge in this area. Quite luckily it turned out that there was a similar magazine that concentrated mainly on the older artist and discovering new talent that replicates the dated sound from the 60’s. I found this a good choice to produce a similar magazine around and as it was such a specific audience it was quite easy to tailor it around. I only had to change some of the language used in interviews and reviews and change the majority of the photo’s to a monochrome photo (as said previously). I aimed it for that age group specifically as there would be a lot more expendable cash then a younger audience and on top of this they would suit the time period for retro music perfect as it would be the ideal time for them to have listened to some of the more classic band.

I attracted my specific audience by using monochrome pictures to evoke a sense of nostalgia so that the consumer could relate to the old fashioned bands and discover new talent that will let them reminisce towards the older days of music. I tried to remain with the front covers central image being in a strong compositional ‘V’. This replicated the same three man bands that the old generations were used to. I think it did a good job of attracting attention from my specific target audience as the black, white and red colour scheme only really applied to my specific audience and the way that they feel. Unfortunately I couldn’t replicate some of the classic effects.  I tried using a classic film strip effect on the contents page to add something original to look at in the contents page that also has

I have learnt from using Photoshop a few new techniques. I have also been able to use InDesign to arrange the magazine into a professional layout. If I am, honest when I first started this task I told myself I wasn’t going to use InDesign and stick to what I know. I ;earnt how to use the de-saturation tool to create a faded white image and also learnt that yould edit the dark blacks in an image using Reflecting upon this decision this was a poor choice and didn’t allow me to arrange as well as I could have done. Eventually I started to use it finally on my article and it made designing magazines twice as easy. At first it took some adapting to as I couldn’t use some of the cursor tools or magic wand tools which I was used to, but soon picked up the methods of getting around this. I used the adobe package to assemble the magazine and create a lot of ease when I used them in conjunction. I was extremely pleased with some of the knowledge I gained from using these applications and picked up a few new techniques for my previous Photoshop work at home. I also learnt how to use the Pen tool on InDesign to sketch around the boarder of a picture and get the exact copy highlight of it. This allowed me to manipulate an exact replica of the picture so you can create overlapping text or move a picture in front of a letter.

I think my idea’s from my preliminary task was a bit too ambitious for my own good as some of the editing techniques required were extremely complicated and although I replicated some of them, some of them would require a very long tutorial and a lot of spare time, not to mention the restriction of not being able to use found images. I also didn’t have as much knowledge as I do now about various magazine industry standard terminologies and techniques they use.  Because of this I had to edit some of the featured articles and lead articles in and essentially completely transform my original ideas and add specific magazine related features. More importantly what I found that completely contrasted between my preliminary task and my final was the lack of theme and target audience.

Design Process

First of all I aimed my music magazine at a more mature audience, someone that would enjoy a more retro, old fashioned music genre. This left me with quite a difficult audience to target as it has no specific targeted age but just a general appeal to an overall audience. This made my theme non-sepcific to age and instead made it specific to the style of music. This said I tailored my music magazine to suit the genre by adding clean-cutbold mastheads with a little classic signature strapline beneath it. I also followed the style by making my pictures desaturated to create the nostalgic feel. I used a palette of red, black and white because of my mood board. I looked at the existing text MOJO and noticed that it follows this style by always having a banner at the very top of the magazine offering a free CD.

 This was my first mood board that just summed up the music genre I was aiming it for and all the cliches that follow. I kept it so it allowed me to aim it properly and constantly get themes that run across almost all of the shots.
It was just designed to give me a taste of the themes involved and help me to recreate the same sort of themes as what I tried to do on the final magazine. I think the most poignant of the pictures has to be the snapped acoustic guitar head, this connotes:  Destruction, rebellion and the old fashioned rock. The same theme of a classic genre of music which has slowly been discarded and broken throughout the years to make way for the new and shiny electric guitars and I specifically tried to rebel against this trend in my magazine and tried to keep some of the classic music involved in every single page. I also quite liked the use of black and white and the contrast with a red highlight section over guitar which I finally used at the end of the magazine

This was different to the mood board above as it was aimed at the covers of the magazine I was trying to recreate with the same sort of genre of magazine. I noticed from the word go that the majority of the covers were either in black and white desaturated colours to create an eye catching effect. I also noticed the majority of the covers were in medium close up with a direct mode of adress making the cover alot more eye catching. I also noticed that the masthead was either in black or white with a slight drops shadow and thus recreated the same effect with my final version. most of the magazines I analysed from that point onwards had a three tone colour palette of black, white and a third bold colour such as orange red or yellow. In the end I decided to stay with this same theme and created a white, black and red scheme. I also matched the style of my writing with MOJO and create a much more classic writing style with very analytic expressions and descriptive adjectives and metaphors.