Evaluation Question 7

My College Magazine

Originally, I struggled for ideas in the preliminary task, I had gone through a number of ideas based on my ability with Photoshop, I decided something basic without much colour may be easier for me to design and create. However when put into practice this was not the case, and so I decided to scrap my progress and start again. Although my designing of an album cover went well in my opinion, I constantly found trouble in designing a college magazine, perhaps I am more familiar with album art and so it was easier for me. My final design was to do something that perhaps college students could relate to, so I used a plain A4 page, then measured out some lines, to create a lined A4 page, much like ones students would use. My plan was to make it in the style of a scrapbook, with sticky notes and taped photos. Once again, due to my lack of ability with Photoshop, the image in my head did not transfer to a Photoshop image very well.

My Music Magazine

As I mentioned earlier, perhaps one of the reasons that I had been able to create an album design much easier than I had been able to create a college magazine was that I was more familiar with it. I think this could be one of the reasons that my music magazine was a significant improvement over my original magazine. It is fair to say that my skill with Photoshop between the two had improved substantially also, due to another one of my college subjects being Games Development, we had to learn to use Photoshop quite quickly in order to show our ideas well. I have also learnt a lot about placement regarding magazines, masthead, coverlines and photos all must be in suitable areas to create a professional looking magazine.

Tools and Techniques

During the production of both of my magazines, I learnt a number of useful techniques for use in Photoshop, one of these, designed particularly for use on faces was the spot-healing tool. I had used this on some of the models in my music magazine, it essentially is a click and drag which copies over the look of the skin next to a spot on top of the spot (or whatever needs to be "cleaned").

The use of layers in Photoshop helped my in creating my final piece also, it allows for easy manipulation, moving images in front or behind each other, as well as editing whole layers without editing the whole image. I had used the drop shadow more than any other of the layer properties, it was an easy way of emphasising certain words or sentences.

Another useful tool was the magic wand, which allows for selection of areas that use a certain shade of colour (or similar depending on tolerance). This enabled me to cut people or backgrounds out from images. I was able to fill in the glimmer in my band's eyes from the flash of the camera using this tool, little tweaks such as this added up in making my magazine what it is today.

Photoshop's ruler feature also helped in the alignment and placing of my images, text and other content. While the rulers actually measure how wide the page is, it also allows you to pull off blue guidelines to place around the page, the most useful thing about this, is that images and other content will snap to these lines, creating easy placement guidelines.

Audience Appeal

I believe that using a constant scheme of dark colours, sharp fonts and relative stories (including that featured on the double page spread) helps in general to appeal to my target audience. Including a main feature of an upcoming band's world tour would appeal to my target audience as they are actively looking for new music that they would like, the fact that the band is shown as not being too well known means that it is unlikely they have heard of the band. The posture and clothing that the band wear throughout the images in the magazine should appeal to my target audience also, they should be seeing themselves as acting the same way within reason and wearing similar clothes.

Evaluation Question 6

Technologies

Throughout the creation of my magazine pages I had used a number of different technologies, some which were very familiar to me and some which I had not used before and so had to slowly learn. Recent technology has made the task of designing and creating my own music magazine much more simple, especially with free software/websites. The most significant technologies which helped me finish my magazine product were:

Photoshop

A professional image editing software

Blogger

A website which provides a personal blog free of charge

Flickr

A website which allows the uploading and annotation of image for free

Dafont

A collection of user-made fonts which are (mostly) provided for use without asking permission

VideoPad Editor

A basic video editing software, allows the trimming of clips of film and audio

Microsoft PowerPoint

A presentation software, also allows the presentation to be saved in a video format

Wax

A slightly more advanced free video editing software, however this does not let you preview audio when editing

Photoshop
What is most likely to be the most important piece of technology that has helped me during the designing process of my magazine. The tools featured in photoshop have really helped me to achieve more than I could is a more basic program, such as the default Paint. Photoshop features a variety of tools, including smudge (which allows you to blend colours and shapes into each other while making it appear slightly blurred), blur and the magic wand (which allows me to quickly select a large area (regardless of shape) that is of a similar colour (dependant on tolerance). Another useful feature of Photoshop is the fact that it uses a series of layers, which can be laid under or over other layers. Layers can also be edited as a whole with different effects such as gradient overlays, stroke or textures. For example, the font used in the "Scorched" title, was textured with a rocky texture I found online. I then added a few other effects so that some areas were black and other patches were a silver colour. A major disadvantage to photoshop is the fact that it costs a large amount, luckily the college computers have this installed and so I could use the program there. Also, Photoshop file types are usually very large in size, and so it was important that I created JPEG files or PNG files often along with my main photoshop files.

Blogger

This website was useful for my assignment as it provides me with a free place to store my blog (and of course work). Blogger allows for personalised designs on its blogs and so therefore helps

add a small something to the work I upload. The label feature also allows me to organise all of my work into categories, so that I can find it much easier. Of course, as with all free sites there are disadvantages, given the fact that I am not actually paying for the use of this site, then the owners have all rights to shut down the site without warning, if and when they want. The v

ariety of ways that you can edit and customise your blog is very useful when it comes to uploading my work, it allows me to use more formats than perhaps other sites would. For example, some areas have used videos or pictures rather than basic text.

Flickr

This site allowed me to upload my images and then annotate specific areas with text. Essentially you drag a rectangular shape over the area and add a note which appears when the mouse is hovered over the specific zone. Like Blogger, this site is also free and so the same disadvantages apply. Although I could upload the pictures directly to Blogger, I preferred for the most part to use Flickr as it allowed for easier annotation.

DaFont

This website helped me throughout and contributed to the final piece, www.dafont.com is essentially a website where users can upload their own fonts which they have created. Others can then download and use these, however, using the college computers meant that we could not install our own custom fonts. Luckily, DaFont had a useful feature in which you can type in some sample text, choose the desired size and then get an image version of what the text would look like. Using this I was able to get the desired font and text, this did mean going into Photoshop and editing out the white areas around the text though.

VideoPad Editor

While creating a video, I noticed that I needed to cut out certain clips from a file. The last time I had used Windows Movie Maker, it was not possible to cut clips from within a film and so I decided to do some research into a useful free video and audio editor, VideoPad was the result of this. VideoPad, while not as useful as more advanced programs such as Sony Vegas, allowed me to edit the video to an extent that I was satisfied with, the only drawback of this software is that the text overlays (or subtitles as they call them) are very limited in position, size and colour.

Microsoft PowerPoint

One particular area where Microsoft PowerPoint proved useful was a compilation of all of my original images for the Magazine, I was able to use 1 image per slide and then use a suitable transition (fade) to progress through the slideshow. Finally, PowerPoint enabled me to add some suiting calm background music to add effect, once this was all completed I was able to save the PowerPoint as a video (which progressed through slides at timed intervals) and upload it directly to my blog.

Wax

This is one of the many video editing software that I looked into, this seemed to the best of those that I had found, however I encountered a problem during playback, after some looking into the problem I had discovered that Wax could not in fact play audio during preview, and so this program was of no use to me, as I needed to cut out both audio and video from the clips I had. Though it did give me the specific timings so I could trim video, I could not hear the audio to find which areas needed to be cut.

Evaluation Question 5

My magazine appeals to my target audience through a series of dark colour and fonts which are sharp. The style itself is quite dark, including the title: "Scorched". In order to make sure that what I was creating did really appeal to my target audience, I would ask potential readers to constantly evaluate my progress, looking at what they liked and what they would change. When I believed my work was finished, I had a member of my audience look over the images using a computer and recording their thoughts with a microphone. I used a program called CamStudio to record the screen footage, however this did result in some colours being slightly off, however when Jason was looking at the images he saw the originals and not what appears in the video below.

Interview

Evaluation Question 4

My Audience
My audience are generally thought of as being energetic, unique and often violent. The majority will wear band merchandise on a daily basis, from t-shirts to sweatbands and often even bags, some even have tattoos of their favourite band's names. My audience tend to have the same interests regarding things other than music, for example, many metal listeners are also gamers, and spend a large proportion of their free time playing video games. Along with video games and metal music being among my audience's interests, horror movies will also be a key part, it is for the most part the favoured genre of films regarding my audience.

Some adverts that would appeal to my audience include fast food, video games, metal gigs and energy drinks. Attending music festivals and gigs can be hard work and requires a lot of energy, and so these kind of products would appeal to my audience.

Evaluation Question 3

Publishers
I have chosen to use a large company for the distribution of my magazine, rather than a local one, this is because my magazine has a wide audience rather than a small select group, so distribution over large areas is important, and a larger company can help with this. Of course this does come with a rather large amount of experience and so the publishers will know how to get the magazine to the right people, through advertising or other means.

Naturally, there are some disadvantages to using a large company over a smaller independent business. There is bound to be some areas of my magazine that the company would want to change, one such area is advertising. While I do not want the majority of the magazine to be advertising, it is likely that the publishers (in order to agree to distribute my magazine) would want to increase the amount of advertising, as well as the variety of adverts included within it. Choosing to go with a much smaller publisher would most likely rid me of these problems but then the problem of getting the magazine to further areas arises, and so I have chosen to sacrifice in order to get the magazine to more people.

The magazine publisher in particular I have chosen to use is Bauer, this is because although they do publish Kerrang, my magazine will feature in general slightly heavier music. This should interest them as Metal Hammer currently outsells Kerrang, so Bauer would need a music magazine similar as a form of competition against Metal Hammer.

Evaluation Question 2

Representation

Below, you can see my double page spread, the image in particular was inspired by an image I found in a double page spread from a Kerrang magazine (as seen below). I had attempted to organise the members of my makeshift band into coming to a local park on an early foggy morning, in an attempt to recreate the same image, but due to lack of availability this was not possible. Instead, I had decided to use other elements of the image in the creation of my own, one important element featured in Kerrang's image was the blank look on the band member's faces. This works well with the casual posture, once again is similar to Kerrang's image. A notable difference between the two, is the fact that Kerrang's camera angle is much lower than my own, this was not intentional, looking at the two images in comparison, I believe using a lower camera angle in my own image may have worked better, however I also had to be wary of the background, as the room had a relatively low ceiling, meaning that part of the image may not be plain white wall.

The above image is my double page spread, while below is my inspiration (Kerrang)

In general, my audience would be thought of as wearing dark (most likely black) clothing, and so I had instructed all of my models to wear as dark as possible clothing in the image. I wanted to back up the stereotype of metal listeners in my magazine, in a positive light. I would have preferred one of my models to also have a piercing, but the fact that none of them did was not a big issue.

Advertising
When regarding advertising within my magazine, I wanted to be mid-way between pro-consumerist and anti-consumerist. The products advertised within my magazine would be very specific to my audience, and this is why I want some, but not many adverts within the magazine, as there is not a large range of products that would tempt my potential audience, other than band merchandise. The adverts featured in my magazine would be mostly if not all band merchandise items, such as branded hoodies, t-shirts and sweatbands, exceptions for advertising may be instruments or similar items.

Evaluation Question 1

Conventions
Conventions in general is the standard way in which something is done, when concerning music magazines it is generally describing the layout of the magazine. Conventions are useful for giving your reader a familiar layout, as all magazines that follow conventions will use the same base layout. However, ignoring conventions and designing something completely different may appeal to specific audiences but it is slightly more risky than following conventional layouts. For the most part, magazines will be conventional in layout, how far a magazine will stray from conventions is defined by the subject, audience and producers.

Magazine Front Cover Concept #1, a photo by Tyler Curtis Media on Flickr.

Click on the above image to be redirected to my flickr image

With my music magazine I have worked around the genre of "Metal" and "Rock" music. Which are generally perceived by people to quite rebellious and violent. The style also often features (design wise) quite dark colour schemes and rough designs rather than other genres which will have quite clean artwork. For this reason I have chosen to use the title "Scorched" which represents something that is not perfect as it has been burnt and darkened. The font I used for this, also represented the word itself, it uses cracked black font with an orange fire-like glow surrounding it. The text also features sections of silver colour, which represents metal.

Magazines which influenced my own design are Kerrang and Metal Hammer. Kerrange more influenced layout rather than anything else, I worked most of my layout around previous issues of Kerrang, however design itself is much like that of Metal Hammer, but less extreme in comparison of content.

Metal Hammer example
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3302/3231944310_fceb9ebb01.jpg

Kerrang example
http://www.isubscribe.co.uk/images/covers/uk/5/69/large/kerrang-1287194449327.jpg

Contents page - Music Mag, a photo by Tyler Curtis Media on Flickr.

Click on the above image to be redirected to my flickr image

Photos
For the images I used in my magazine, I had decided to create a metal based band and because of this I wanted all or most of my band members to be wearing dark colours, preferably black. The lack of bright colours and plain background also helped the people within the images to stand out more. I decided to use no props in my images, just the band members themselves, I had considered using real instruments in the images but this was not possible after asking around for loan of equipment. In terms of cropping and editing of images, there was very little in general, some images may have had the tops trimmed slightly or have been darkened, but other than that the images are in their original condition.

Media Double Page, a photo by Tyler Curtis Media on Flickr.

Click on the above image to be redirected to my flickr image