fifth front cover draft

I've had a very productive day it seems. This is the 5th draft I've done for my front cover, and the 3rd today. With this draft I reverted back to having more sell lines around the central model, but i edited the way the main story's sell line was written, as I feel this makes it stand out more from the other stories on the front page, due to it having more colours and overlapping words, which makes it more visible and draws the readers eye

Fourth front cover draft

After editing the positions of sell lines on my front cover I wanted to try out a new idea, so I tried to used a minimalist approach to my cover, removing almost all of the sell lines and replacing them with a list of artists in a line across the bottom of the page. While I enjoyed creating this draft, I don't think I will use it for my final piece, as while having very little on the page does look good, I think it is not done very widely in my genre to be considered as 'conventional', so it would not be done in normal circumstances.

Third front cover draft

After some going over of my current draft I decided to try to add more to my front cover, so I moved the sell lines around and added a new one to use the most of the space i had given myself by moving others around. While it is a minor change I am happy with how it turned out so I thought I should blog it

Media Institutions

A media institution is an organization that deals with the production, marketing, distribution and regulation of media products. While there are many of these companies to choose from, if I was to produce my magazine professionally I would want to use a company that already produces magazines similar to my product.


Some of the media institutions that produce music magazines in the same genre as my magazine are:

• Bauer Media Group - Publishers of Q and Kerrang! magazines
• Freeway Press Inc. - Publishers of Rock Sound magazine
• Alternative Press Magazine Inc. - Publishers of Alternate Press magazine
• Jann Wenner - Publisher of Rolling Stone magazine
• IPC Media (Subsidiary of Time Warner) - Publisher of NME

While any of these companies would be a potential publisher of my magazine, I could also go to a publisher which does not produce a rock music magazine, e.g. EMAP, who published smash hits magazine. Doing this would allow the company to tap into a new market, and increase their own profits without risking a loss to any magazines they currently produce.

Comparison: Alternate Press and my magazine

  

While making my music magazine, I used some ideas from the magazine 'Alternate Press' to pad out my front cover. The magazines above show the range of styles this magazine uses. The magazine in the centre has been turned black and white, an idea which I replicated in my piece, and the saturation has been changed. As a result this image can be associated with the 1970's, when in reality it is a modern day image and band. The image on the left, on the other hand, is in colour and uses a high angle to show the group of models. The final image, on the right, shows a close up of a single model. The use of colour, or lack of, makes the model stand out in my opinion as the paleness of the models face against a completely black background makes him stand out. This, coupled with the direct mode of address, makes this style of cover look quite effective at drawing the readers attention in my opinion. My magazine, shown on the right, uses a style similar to the magazine above it, with a single model close up taking up the majority of the page. While I like how the style I used for my magazine looks, I might experiment with changing the saturation levels of the image to give the image a different feel

Second draft

I've recently finished my second draft, which has used some of the ideas on my first draft and removed others completely. I used the image as the background, taking up all the space in the magazine cover, and put text around this to add to the page. I removed the red banner at the top of the page on my first draft, as I felt it would be too clashing with the full black and white page. I kept the image as monochrome, as I think this makes both the image and the text on top of it to stand out more.

New cover ideas

I have just had a revelation for my cover idea! Instead of using an entire band, I'm going to use a close up of a single persons face, which takes up the entire page. I have also considered making the picture black and white, as while not often used, black and white images are sometimes used in rock music magazines, especially in alternative magazines such as Alternate Press, who have had cover pages such as these:

While not often used, I feel that this is a very good idea to use, as it is directly addressing the reader, and pulls focus to the main story in the magazine.