Front Cover Drawn Drafts

1) This was my first attempt at drawing my magazine. I have used the colours red mainly with blue which will be the same shade as the colour of the artists jacket.
The masthead is in the top left hand corner so it will be viewed first due to the visual syntax.
There is a pug in the top right hand corner which will attract the audience as it states the magazine includes a free manual. This is also in a good position as it fills in a space that is free due to the size of the masthead.
Under the masthead is the slogan, 'The Music You Need". This is branding of the magazine so it being near the masthead is good.
The cover lines are going down along the left hand side of the magazine. They are in a bold red colour which will stand out. There is thick blue lines in between each cover line to show the separation between them
The main image is a long shot and he is looking into the camera (even though the drawing poorly illustrates this) from a sideways stance. He is also carrying a guitar in a case to show the musical side of the photograph.
The anchorage text is also in red and is on the right hand side of the magazine, going around the outline of Conor.
There is a bar code as a magazine needs one as it will be purchased.
Also on my magazine is a twitter symbol with the magazines twitter account. This allows the magazine to be involved with the latest trends.

This is the second drawing. This uses the similar colour scheme, with red and blue. These are common colours I see through out music magazines of the indie rock genre.
I have included a pug, which is in a similar shape to a vinyl. This is a idea which allows my magazine to relate to its genre and its target audience. People who have an interest in indie rock music also commonly have an interest in vintage products, one of those being vinyls, which is also linked to music. In this pug it states the will receive a free poster inside, which is more of an incentive to buy the magazine.
All of the coverlines are on the left handside of the magazine. This gives a neat and minimal look to the magazine which I like. It makes it seem like an established magazine, which is a look I would like my magazine to have. However, it does make the right side appear to be boring, which is definitely not a look I would want.
The anchorage text is big and bold and catches the readers eyes. It uses two different colours to give a colourful, interesting look and uses different font sizes which makes it look more fun, which will appear to my youthful target audience.
The main image is a long shot, which is common within magazines. You can see his whole outfit and a prop of a guitar. This relates well to my genre and will attract my audience well.

This is my third drawing.

My masthead here is different to the two others as I wanted to see a variety, rather than using the same. It is bold stretched across the whole page which is a good look as it stands out more. The letters are big and read easily.

The bar code is places in a different place to normal, as it is usually on the top or bottom of the magazine, although, this positioning I found looks well and fits nicely, explaining the price and issue to the top and right of it.

The colours used are of a similar shade being blues and greens. This fits well to my audience as there is a slightly higher amount of males in my target audience than girls, but girls will still pick up the magazine if they're in the target audience as the colours are bright and attractive.

The pug uses the colour scheme used on the front cover. It states that their is a free gig guide inside, which will make my target audience want to get it as they are of the age range 15-24, and these could be either new comers to gigs or regular gig goers who want to know best places. 

The anchorage text is in between to lines, which makes it stand alone from the rest of the text. This is a good thing to do as it allows this to be the main text of the magazine. 

There is a banner at the bottom of the page which looks great, and is appropriate to the magazine and fits the colour scheme well. 

Blog Feedback - Research and Planning

Here is the document which my teacher has put together showing my current progress through my media coursework. It shows the different tasks in the research and planning section and clearly highlights the category of marks I received for each individual task. Overall on this section I am at an A with 17/20. This exceeds my target of a B so it shows I have done more than expected and very well in my coursework.
The document also included comments from mrs mitchell, my media teacher of what went well in my coursework and what would make my coursework even better. These comments are good as it lets me  know what my teacher thinks and I can use these points to keep my work at its high standard and allows me to know how to make my work even better.
Finally, the document has a paragraph written by me explaining how I felt personally about my work up to now in media. This is good as it allowed me to think about how I feel and what I think I am doing well and what areas I need to improve my work.

Survey Monkey Responses Analysis

These are the responses for the survey monkey questionnaire I posted previously. I posted the link for my survey on my twitter and Facebook as I know they will be viewed by target audience. I also emailed this survey link to my friends and students in my media class. This allows me to receive 33 responses and gave me clear results to help me to decided features and information needed to make my magazine to a higher standard. It also lets me to have a much more clearer understanding of my music magazines target audience such as the activities they enjoy such as watching TV/movies and listening to music. It has helped me decided a magazine price of £1.99 to ensure I receive enough sales. Survey Monkey was very helpful as research into my target audience as the analyze section allows me to view clearly as shown in the presentation I have produced with clear bar chats and tally's with both amounts and percentages. I will most likely use this technology again as I have found survey monkey to be very helpful and a great website.

Front Cover Moodboard

Magazine Layouts

These are my potential magazine layouts.
Throughout all of my layouts created, I have put the masthead in the top left hand corner. I think this is the best place for a masthead to go due to the visual syntax, it will be the first bit of text seen. It is also reinforcing the features of an indie-rock magazine as all the others also have their masthead in this corner such as NME and Q.
The shape for my pug/puff is going to be a circle. That way, I can design it to look like a vinyl. This will be a good feature to my magazine as even though a record player is an old fashioned device, many of my target audience have these products as they are interested in 'vintage' products. As well as it being vintage style, it is music related, so that is further adding to the characteristics of my music magazine.
I want the font of my anchorage text to be larger that the font of my cover lines. This is because the anchorage text is related to the main image so it is more important and it is also the main headline of the magazine. Because of that, it has to be easily seen as it will be the story which will attract the audience the most.
I like the look of cover lines being on the sides of the magazine. I think this looks very professional and allows it to be easily read. In one of my designs, I have put cover lines going across the bottom, this could look good but depending on the type of photo I use this may hide important features of the photo. I would also prefer my anchorage text to be placed here.
I also have featured a slogan. These are usually linked to the masthead, so I have mainly placed it above or below the masthead. In one case it is placed at the bottom of the magazine. I think this would be better if my slogan was a longer phrase.

Survey Monkey

I have made another survey using the website SurveyMonkey. This survey is to ask questions to my target audience such as their age, hobbies and what designs they like best. I have used survey monkey as my way of making this survey as it is quick, easy to use and easy to share to as many people as I like. However, surveymonkey limits me to 10 questions per survey which I view as a negative as it dosen't allow me to ask as many question as I may find necessary, Although, this can be easily over come by making several surveys.

Here is the link for my survey:

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

I have tweeted this link on my twitter page and posted it onto my Facebook page. Here, my target audience will be able to find the link and answer the questions allow to have a further understanding on my target audeince such as their hobbies and the price range. I will also be able to identify which styles of front cover page, contents page and double page spread they like the most. When I receive a reasonable amount of responses, I will analyse the results to help me go on to design my own indie- rock magazine

Brand Identity

1) Create Compelling Magazine Covers.
 - The way in which I will ensure my magazine front cover is visually appealing to the reader from six feet away is by ensure the main image is eye catching. The main image and the masthead are the first parts of the front cover that the reader will see. Because of this, I will ensure that they are very appealing and draw the audience in. The way which I can do this is by using an attractive, exciting, well known artist or band for the front page image. The musicians that are featured on the front cover of my magazine will have to be well liked. Otherwise, the magazine will not be liked automatically by the readers. Since my magazine is a rock genre, if I were to feature somebody such as One Direction or Justin Bieber, this would not attract my audience like it would for a younger pop-music enthusiast. I will have to feature bands such as Jimi Hendrix or The Arctic Monkeys as these are liked a lot by my audience. This will also have to be reoccurring design, having well-liked artists, because if not, the magazine will lose interest of their readers. Magazine cover need to stay consistent.
 I will also use a bold font that is easily read and uses bright colours such as red. Red is a colour used a lot in rock magazines so it is proven that the colour red appeals to my audience. My research into other mastheads and magazine colours has allowed me to recognize what a compelling magazine cover will look like.
The anchorage text will also need to be eye-catching. A short a sweet headline that it quick and easy to read which will immediately make the reader want to read further into the magazine. 

2) Focus Your Content to Your Target Audience.
- My target audience will be from the ages 16-25. These ages are older teenagers/young adults. Because of this will magazine will have to be quite youthful but still mature enough to not be viewed as childish. The language I use will be quite informal to keep interest of my age group. They will be interested in Rock music, more specifically indie-rock. This will mean having interviews to these types of artist and bands and special pictures and posters of them. Also album/concert reviews of indie-rock artists. My target audience will all most-likely have mobile phones and will be using social networking apps quite regularly. Because of this, I could relate the context of my magazine to social networking and mobile phones and include usernames of Instagrams and Twitters of the artists that are featured in my magazine. 


3) Choose a Graphic Design That Reflects Your Magazine's Purpose

The reason that I have used this as a masthead for my magazine as it fits in well with the Genre. It looks quite disorientating which makes it match well for an indie/alternative rock magazine. Rock tends to be loud and noisy which works as it is in capitals and the name of the masthead is NOISE. The wave that is going through the words represents a sound wave which then further applies to the music genre that the magazine is. 

4) Respond to Your Changing Audience
- My magazine will need to ensure that it is in line with constantly changing society. The world is constantly adapting to new changes in technologies which will mean my magazine will have to stay inline and adapt to the changes. Music magazines would initially show their top charts through buys of singles from shops. However, now since the internet has pretty much taken over, it would be better to include 'Download' top charts since that is how the audience buys their music today. 
Another way in which my magazine will respond to the ever changing audience is through doing competitions for prizes that are popular at that time. If my magazine were to do competitions once a month, for something up to date such as iTunes vouchers, since iTunes is more common than buying an actual album from HMV now. Another idea is iPhone cases as iPhones are owned by majority of my audience.
My audience now, is a lot more interested in ethical issues than my audience would have at any other time prior to this as it has been recognized a lot more. Because of this, I could make sure that my magazine is made from recycled paper. This will encourage my audeince to buy the magazine as they know that the company is doing more the help the envinroment than other magazines.



5) Brand Beyond the Pages

Since my magazine is a music magazine for rock music, I could hold or be a main sponsor for a rock magazine. This will strongly associate my magazine with rock and widely popularize my magazines brand name as they will attend these rock concerts and see the brand almost every hour at the event and the logo will be presented on the main screens, on bottles or sell clothing at the stand with the brand on, or even sell the magazines there. Also my magazine could give reviews of the festival or do competitions to go to these festivals, this will make the brand more popular as they will be interested in the magazine more as festivals are a main interest of my audience.
 Another way is by having an app for mobile phones which will allow the audience to read copies of magazine or view exclusive interviews and pictures linked to articles in the magazine. An app could be promoted on websites or social media which allows the viewer of the promotion to download the app instantly. This is good as it makes the brand spread further. 
I could also have Facebook pages, Instagram accounts and Twitter accounts for the magazine. This will spread awareness as likes, re-tweets and shares will allow more people to be aware of the magazine brand. 

Research and Analysis

I have used Emaze to make a presentation on further research into music magazines. In the presentation, I have analysis the conventions of not only the front cover of NME music magazine, but I have now started to look at conventions of contents pages and double page spreads. They share similar conventions such as house style, text, main images and titles but there are new conventions I have not seen before such as banners and side images. I have found it quite easy to reason why the editor may have included the conventions they have and seen connotations, denotations and linked to the audience.

Audience responce on my masthead

I made a survey asking my target audience which masthead they think looks the best. I made this question through the website survey monkey. This allows me to create a question which saves and give me an analysis of the responses clearly.

This is the URL that I sent around for people to answer the question:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MR6XLGV

Here is my results to the question

This shows that the NOISE masthead is in favor by my target audience with most votes. 45.45% of the votes are for NOISE. The least favorited is BANG, only getting 18.18% of the votes.
Due to this clear analytically graph and chart provided by survey monkey, I am able to identify which masthead will help my magazine to be more successful. Evidently, it is NOISE, the first option. The reason I think this was most popular within my target audience is that it is quite a individual style of font that is not similar to anything been seen on a magazine, or anywhere for that matter. Since indie rock is a genre that tries to be different, this explains why it may have been popular.

Masthead Mockups - Digital

Masthead Mock-Ups - Drawings

These are my first masthead mock-ups. 
I drew these up in lesson using my knowledge of current Indie Rock magazine mastheads. I understand that the most common colour seen is red. Therefore I used a lot of red when designing them. Other common colours are black and white. Thus why those colours have also been used on my masthead mock ups.
What I also know is that they use a lot of capitalisation. This shows a connection to music as it signifies shouting and loudness. Because of that I have used capital letters in majority of my designs. 
The names I have used are related to Indie-rock music. For example, instruments that are commonly seen in them bands,'Ukele' and 'Drum'. 
I also have words like noise and music to relate to the genre. 
BM used initials of 'Best Music'. So did 'I' for 'Independant' and 'S' for 'Sound'. The reason for me using initials for the masthead is because it is a common design that I have seen in rock magazine, such as NME and Q. It also allows it to be short and sweet which means that it is easy to remember and recognized. All of my masthead designs are short words which allows the reader to remember them well.
The 'muzik' masthead represents the word music. This is good as the use of z and k make the word more sharp, which is favourable to the rock audience. Also, my target audience is quite young, around 16-25, using variations of spelling will appeal to them as slang will be very common to them as the use internet, texting and social media often, which allows them to relate to the way it is wrote.
Capital letters are common in my designs as this allows them to appear louder and attract the readers attention quicker as capital letters are more bold than lower case letters. This is good as I want my masthead to stand out to the readers.

What is my magazine genre?

The genre of music that my magazine will be based on is the independent/indie rock category. I have chosen this genre as I have an interest in this genre and therefore will be able to design the magazine better than any other as I already have knowledge over the genre.

Examples of current established music magazines that are from this cateogory is NME, Clash, The Rolling Stones, Spin, Q and Fader.

Here are some mastheads of those magazines:

These 6 mastheads share similar conventions. Such as, the colours they have used. They all use white, most use black and majority use red. These are 3 unisex colours which allows the masthead hit the audience of both males and females.
Also, they have bold fonts. This makes it easy to read and it catches the readers eyes to allow them to read the magazine.
The titles are mostly short to allow them to be memorized, using mostly one words or letters. This is an effective convention as it helps to popularize the magazine as it will be remembered.
Except for Rolling Stones, the use capital letters, to make it seem 'loud' since they are indie rock magazines since that is loud music.

Analysis of a music magazine

Here is an analysis I did on the Rolling Stone magazine cover. I have been analysis the different conventions of the magazine. The masthead, main image, cover lines, anchorage text and the puff. I wrote about the denotations, connotations, key words and the audience. It is easily identified when I am speaking about which through the colour codes I have made and added to each slide of the presentation.
The final slide is the self-feedback of my work. I marked them as proficient as I feel that I did and in depth analysis of the magazine.

Evaluation/Reflection: Question 4

4.How did you attract/address your audience?




To answer this question, I used Emaze. A website which allows you to produce professional and easy to use presentations. I found it useful to use for this question as I could add information easily about how I attracted my audience I could include different shapes and pictures to allow it to be understood well.

Evaluation/Reflection: Question 3

3.Who would be the audience for your media product? .

To answer this question, I have created a poster. This clearly illustrates who the audience of my magazine will be. Since it is a school magazine, it shows the students are going to be the 'majority' readers of the magazine. These are ages 11-18 years old being in secondary school and sixthform. I have drew a boy and a girl to show it also it aimed to both genders.

Even though they are who the magazine is mainly aimed to, I have included other possible audience of the magazine being the teachers and parents. Even though these do not attend the school, the are a stakeholder of the school so they will be interested to see what is in the magazine.

Evaluation/Reflection: Question 2

2.How does your media product represent particular social groups? (Most of you have a picture of students – how are they presented?)

Evaluation/Reflection: Question 1

1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? I have used the programme ThingLink to answer this question. The reason for this is that it shows the magazine front cover well and I can inform the reader the different conventions easily and show why they are used on my magazine. It is well presented and easily shown.

School Magazine Final Front Cover

Here is my final version of my school magazine front cover.
I have made several changes since my original draft of the front cover due to the comments and video responses I received about my draft.
I was told that the best features were the main image and the masthead. Due to this, there wasn't any changes made to them as they seemed to be in favor already.
However, I was informed that the cover would be even better if the cover lines were a different font and colour to ensure they were easily readable. Therefore, I changed the font to a more basic font and added a white outline around the blank font to ensure it is easily read on the background,
I was also told that the white box i used to make the text readable ruined the main image. To overcome this issue, I inserted the white box only for the anchorage text and placed it so it didn't overlap any crucial parts of the main image.

Blog Feedback

This is the feedback sheet made by Mrs Mitchell, on my research and planning section for my blog. My current grade is 'C+'. Below on the photo explains what I have do well so far, and how I can improve my blog to get a higher grade. 

Interview on my school magazine front cover draft.

Interview 1 - Lisa Kinsella

Interview 2 - Conor Jarvis


Interview 3 - Eve Foran

School Magazine Front Cover Draft