Contents page work

As you can see I have made headlines for what my music content will be about for a particular region. Using same and specific fonts to keep my house style throughout the magazine. The next step I will be adding an International section which will include music news about various topics in different countries an example would be top artists in Japan or astonishing news in Berlin etc....

Well since I couldn't take screen shots of the rest of the steps this is the final piece which includes a business section as I have mentioned before that I will be Adding. My analysis for this piece would be that the layout looks very good and suits my target audience, an abstract headlines that don't reveal too much context however in the international section, The countries is a bit too pale, but in my opinion I think the headlines should stand out more than the actual country so i decided not to make it black. As for the business section, I think the headlines are good, because they are actually facts so people are more interested in these lines. I will be giving this to a professional to give me some extra feedback and might or will be changing some context.

context market research

After I have done my market research I have found out that my context should consist of interesting headlines, even though it’s a music magazine it is said to be great to include news, business tech etc…

What would you ask for a music magazine to have ? (I have asked my target audience)

Well of course music related lines and context, but as your magazines are targeted towards an expensive background it would be a great choice to include some news that would save me some time to read or actually buy newspapers.

-       I have decided to include business news headlines, this is because my target most of my target audiences response has been towards business and music. And considering my personal experience most people who would actually buy things like magazines would be interested in reader news as well.

Possible new topics:

-       japan’s nuclear reactors

-       traffic safety

-       stocks

Possible music headlines:

-       recording techniques

-       broadway collaboratiopns
The reasons that I have decided to completely take real information for my business news is because most of them will be recognizable if they are things that have actually happened. As a matter of fact on the adult side they idea as because they can read serious news as well as hobby news in the same article instead of taking news of Internet this idea seemed more 'slack' for them and does not put as much stress on them compared to news from bbc, fox etc...

Contents Page design - no context just yet

 Here I have used the same font as my cover page, for the contents font I used my anchorage text's font and for my masthead and date it was the body text.

 Here I have added borders around my page, this was to make it easier to align context and also to make the page look "organised" as a posh taget audience magazine.

 Here I have added images, one taken from a piano studio room, the reason I chose to take it like this was because, the piano and the chandelier is visible, this is to emphasize the fact that these things are expensive. Of course the gibson guitar was also used as the second image but rather than brand I wanted to focus on the bokeh effect because rather than having a clear image, this looks more fashionable at the same time draws audience's attention more than a full focused image.

Audience Feed backs and changes to be made

How does my contents page look at this stage?

Well in my opinion it doesn’t really look effective to me because of the contrasty colours that are being used. As you can see the first image of the model, stands out significantly from the other two images, especially with the fact that it is the same model as the cover page, the audience may think that: well, this magazine might only just contain context about one person while the rest of the context is uninteresting tabloids. The second thing I would like to point out is that the guitar image is too badly stretched from the original size, which makes it look horrible, you need to keep the aspect ratio of the image. And you should really get rid of the piano image, even though given the fact that: yes it is an expensive product, but the image contrasts too differently from the other two which gives off an awkward feel to it instead of a relaxed page to look at.

Changes made:

I have made all the images black and white, because this will solve the problem of contrasty colours as well as will associate the images together better, given the fact that my magazine is a vintage old style posh magazine, rather than a modern colour image, it might be better to use old fashioned style images.

Final Overview of my Front Cover and Review

According to my audience feedbacks, yes I have changed most of the key things:

·      Skyline repetition of Jimmy Page

• ·      “Free 10 CDs”, Too much free CDs and irritable font effects
• ·      The whole left column doesn’t look good, especially grammar
• ·      Masthead and main image overlaps each other too much
• ·      Non consistency of fonts

Yes I have made the changes to my skyline so I have made it smaller and changed make changes to the fonts to make it the same as most of my cover lines below. The reason I chose to do this is because the reader would feel more relaxed if exposed with similar fonts and it would keep my specific house style to eventually create brand recognition.

I have manipulated and have just completely deleted the Free CDs section, firstly because I have realized that my target audience is of a high class social status which means my magazines should not deal with free elements as easy as other magazines. And as well as the left column I have completely changed the whole section, What I have done is combining the left and right excessive space to make my anchorage text stand out even more by making it centre aligned and as large as possible. This will definitely attract the audience into wanting to know what will the context about her be. The same goes for my masthead, which is now larger than before and is completely in the view of the readers. The reason I chose to do this was purely because I wanted to make both my image and mast head stand out, so instead I have made my skyline smaller and just move my images upwards.

Long lastly my magazine now is in the use of similar fonts, this means I am keeping the house style of my magazine to these specific fonts.

Changes made for my front cover

Here in order to meet my feedback responses, yes I have made changes to my Skyline and have changes one of my guitarists to Jimi Hendrix instead to avoid the repetition of Jimmy. The masthead is nice and clear compared to before and the issue date seems more realistic.

 My lines are now nicely in similar fonts, so house style comes in. I intend to keep this font though-out all my following works.

Work Done, my final cover draft #1

Cover page reflection

After having finished my first cover draft, I have been to some of my friends, parents and cousins to ask them for some feedback for my cover page and these are some of my questions:

As my aunt works in the magazine industry, I asked her to give me some professional feedback on how my magazine looks right now.

How do you think my cover page looks?                I think it looks unprofessional, lacks beauty.

Then how could I improve it?     Okay, starting off with your skyline, it looks too abstract compared to your context, you should get rid of the filtering effects and make it look normal, strait text, a font like your lines would be perfect. The second thing you should change is the Free! 10 CDs; that is just horribly made especially the number 10 where you added the effects, maybe you should just delete it and also another thing, your selling your magazines for profit, I find giving out 10 CDs will make your company bankrupt , and even most of my magazines don’t provide free things with it. The next thing is your context, I like your grey lines but you have to make sure that they don’t contain any repetition because your audience would just look at it as if your magazine has no other interesting topics; it’s all about variety son.

Then does my image look good?                               Well as far as I am concerned I like your image and the way you took it because it goes really well with context, you purposely left the right side a blank space for the image, this means you have thought clearly about the fact that text will be on there. But you could make the your title look larger or just make it in front because your magazine is still not a popular, there’s no brand image yet so just make it clear for now, or move it up and make your skyline smaller. As for the left column, get rid of it, it look totally horrible because your use of fonts is too inconsistent, even professional magazines only have a few fonts, let’s use vogue as an example, vogue uses Didot mostly for main text in the magazine, you should make use of similar or just stick to a few.

Then can you just list the things I need to improve on?

Well firstly your skyline, both the colour and size, next is your Free CDs context and your repetition of Jimmy page should be out there, change your whole left column. 

Final cover page production

 Here I added my skyline to my masthead of some very popular guitarists in their time, because this issue will mainly focus on guitarists.

Here I added a date of the issue, as i could randomly make up anything instead I made it the birthdate of Jimmy Page, excluding the year.

 Here  added some cover lines to the piece, and also as you can see I changed my mind about the mast head and decided to make it a little brighter and made it 3D for some extra texture.

 Here is more lines, but as you can see it is not part of my skyline, but that is what I intentionally did to make the audience think, that my magazine is more than those 3 on the skyline.

Now here are sell lines more advertising based and physiological based. Here I used the word "FREE" to draw people's attention because people like free stuff, and also by using words such as GREATEST and of all time.

Now here comes my anchorage text used to introduce my model, And here's what she is.