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?)