Evaluation Question 1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

Starting on the overall theme and mise-en-scéne of the images used in my music magazine, you can see by the cover photo that i have tried to appeal to the indie genre and indie scene of the modern day.

 As you can see above, on the right is the original photo that i used on my front cover, i asked my kind models to wear this attire and to look indie/alternative at their best. I told them if the had suspenders or a waist coat, wear it as this can give and easy potrayel of the indie rocker scene. After the photoshoot, i then imported it into Photoshop to give it a few tweeks, this involved; firstly cropping the image, extracting blemishes on the models skin, cutting out the grassy area by the models legs, changing the colour of the suspenders & extracting the suspenders and finally taking the head of one of the models form another image and putting it onto the final image. This bared quite simple and easy for me as im already a user of Photoshop

I really wanted to extract the suspenders on the model on the far right as they look tacky and out of place in my opinion, changing the colour of the other models suspenders was a large priority aswel as they also look rather out of place being red.

Choosing the title for my magazine was rather difficult, i didnt want to go for a cliche typical name and i also wanted to be abreviated, i made a list of possible titles on paper and then chose the 4 best to put on a poll on my blog for people to vote for which one they think was the best. As you can see here i had a total of 9 votes for my titles and the most went to OTR, an abreviated title for 'Off the Radar' implying the music involved in the magazine is going to be less mainstream and not as known to the general public, hence the meaning 'Off the Radar' as opposed to 'Under the Radar' which would refer to the music being known and heard about.

This is my title form my very first piece of photoshop work this year, my premliminary task front cover title, as you can see there is one similaritie that i have used again in my music magazine which is putting the date verticle at the left hand side of the title.



Here is the title of my music magazine, after endless searching on www.dafont.com i came across this font called 'Truskey', a font that looks old and shattered which seemed most suitable for my title.


Looking at the existing music magazine NME, its clear that there are similaritites between my title and NME's

I chose to put my models head infront of the title as it adds a more professional look, it also means that my models head wouldnt be covered up but the end letter in my title.

This then posed another problem of would the last letter be readable to readers, so some further research into titles showed that NME put the full

name of the magazine underneather the actual title in a smaller sized font.



The layout used on myfront cover is quite simple but yet effective, the main aim i wanted to acheive when creating my front cover was so that the cover lines  and anything else on my front cover would cover the faces of my models and cover up any attire that they are wearing that may block the portrayel of the image to the reader and the overall genre to the reader.

I used contrasting colours for the text on ym front cover, red on white helping the text to stand out with one another, i also used yellow for the plus symbols and for the break in text at the top of the page.
I got the idea of using alternative contrasting colours from NME magazine, here you can see that the colours yellow and white have been used with a red plus symbol, this is very affective as it lets the text stand out more over the background it also makes the cover look more aesthetically pleasing.
The word 'Hottest' in the strapline i chose to display in red because it relates to the word - simple but but yet affective.

The sticker that i made up in photoshop to go on the front page stands out on the background, i chose red as its coincides with my text on the front page aswel

All text that is on the front page is written in capitals, i chose to do this because after to looking at several different magazine covers from different magazines where the editors use capitals for all text on the front page with the exception of quoted text.

This is my contents pages from my school magazine and my music magazine, as you can see the music magazine looks slightly more professional after becoming more fluent with Photoshop. I went for a 3 column layout with the music magazine so i can get a bit more information on the page with a few more pictures to go with the text, i first started with a black background and then went on to put white text on the background, soon after i realised that the printing costs would be ridiculous so i changed it to a white background with a small black boarder around the edge. I also made up a 'Subscription' poster to go in the corner of the page to make it look more authentic.

This the finalised piece for my double page spread, i chose a quite simple but yet affective layout. After doing some research into double page spreads i chose to spread the image across the majority of the double page, as i was using digital SLR which shoots high quality photos it enabled me to do that without pixelating the final draft.
I then chose to put the bulk of the text at the side as i have seen in some magazine examples, this let me keep most of the image untouched by scrappy text wrapped around the image.

I made 3 main drafts of the double page spread, the first of which was good and i quite liked it along with others in my class but i made a crutial error that the double page picture would be on the page fold making the overall presentation scrappy and not as attractive. As you can see the text has been wrapped arpund the main subject in the photo, not only does it look untidy, its also difficult to read and difficult to navigate around.

To make sure that i kept the house style on the double page spread i chose to use the same fonts for the title and for the extract scentance aswell, I also used the same title for the page number in the corner along with the small 'OTR' logo with it.