Evaluation of Music Magazine

Evaluation for My Music Magazine Cover

In this blog entry I am going to evaluate the work I have done on my music magazine cover, the contents and my double-page spread. I will explain what I have done on each of my designs, and why I have done this.
Firstly, I gave my magazine the title of Crash Out! Music. The reason that I gave this title was because my music magazine is in the genre of metal/rock, and I wanted to have an aggressive sounding name, that could also relate to music i.e. crashing of drums, crash cymbal etc. Also crash out is a slang term to pass out, collapse etc, which I think references to a rock and roll lifestyle readers will either be able to relate to, and aspire to. Another metal/rock magazine that has done this with their name is Kerrang!
Another thing I also took reference from Kerrang! Was the exclamation mark. I used an exclamation mark because I think it makes it sound like someone is shouting it and makes it more in your face and aggressive. The reason I wanted this kind of effect for the title is because I think that it is characteristic of the metal/rock genre to have aggressive, loud music, and the fans of this genre (the magazines target audience) will appreciate that in the magazine.
For my magazines front cover I decided to have a photo of a band. You can tell they are a band as they have instruments, a guitar and amp. This is important because it is a music magazine, and it also shows they play their own instruments. In the pop genre it is less important to play instruments etc and more important to sing, look good etc. With metal/rock genre it is a lot about live music and writing songs, and I want to show this in a magazine that is aiming to appeal to metal/rock fans.

The members of the band are not smiling, because I wanted them to look intimidating, typical to the rock stars you might see on Kerrang! For example, Matt Heafy from Trivium . I styled this picture with, black outfits, typical dark make up stereotypical to the rock/metal genre and I had them pose against a plain wall, so the main focus of the image was the band and its instruments. Other rock magazines that do this are ones such as Rolling stone, often posed on a plain background so it's all about the artist/band.
I made the image black and white, although it was not originally, because I needed an even colour to lay text on. In the colour version of the picture there was too much colour going on and I couldn’t figure out which colour I was going to use for font that would have shown up, so I just switched the image to black and white. black and white images are not something used on a lot of rock magazines so i think this gives my magazine a unique look, and it stands out from the other magazines.I also have the photo take up the whole page to draw fans in and make the cover look more interesting.
Now I will talk about the text that I have used on the front cover. The font I used for the cover I chose to suit the genre of that music. It has a kind of eroded and scruffy look, similar to Kerrang! Font and I think that this suits the genre because rock/metal has the stereotypes of being not perfect and clean, like pop is.
I used drop shadow on the text, to emphasise text so it doesn’t looks so flat on the page, and the reader is more drawn to it. The actual headlines I used on the page were all followed by exclamation marks, again to emphasise excitement or shouting to draw the reader in and get them interested.
Also I advertised some features from inside the magazine, so the reader knows what they will be reading. I wrote typical magazine headlines such as ‘top metal tracks inside’ which will appeal to a metal fan, I also wrote ‘poster special’ because this is something fans will want, to have pictures of their favourite bands, and it is a regular feature in a lot of music magazines.
The poster special was a 666th issue special and I included this in the magazine because the metal genre does have connotations of being interested in the darker side of life, devil worship, death etc. 666 is ‘the number of the devil’ so I thought it might be something a metal/rock magazine would celebrate.
I had the double page spread advertised on the front cover because that is a main feature of the magazine and I also made the title for it bigger, a different font etc to emphasise that it was an important feature in the magazine. For the layout of the front cover I kept the masthead at the top because it is most important, other features to the side to make it look ordered, and I also put some text at the bottom to fill more space. In this text I have just named fictional bands, as another way to draw readers in to their favourite bands. It also makes the magazine look like it has a lot of content and persuades readers it will be a magazine worth buying. I have placed the price and the issue number under the title so it is easy to find for readers, and this is fairly common for magazines.
Now I am going to talk about the contents page that I have made. In the contents I chose to make the background black. I made it black because I think that it looks less plain than a white background and it looks more professional than a coloured background.
I used feathering effect on most of the coloured text boxes because I think it gives it a less clean cut feel, again referencing to the stereotypes of the rock metal genre, being scruffy, imperfect etc. The image I used was of the band featured in the double page spread because it gives readers more knowledge as to what is inside the magazine, which is the idea of the contents. I had the image, and the title on a tilt, to make the contents look a bit more edgy and interesting, instead of very neat and structured, because I thought that could bore readers. At the same time, I have made the contents easy to read by its layout. I just used the page number instead of saying Page 1 etc, to make it more informal, because it is an informal magazine.
For the page descriptions, the text in the contents, I tried to keep all the imaginary article titles related to music of the genre. In comparison to Kerrang! contents page they used a lot of pictures and a plain white background. Howevere, i did not have a lot of images due to limited time with a digital camera, so i tried to bring more interest to the page with a black background and coloured boxes.
Finally, I am going to discuss the double page spread. In the double page spread I did one page of my article, an interview with the band, and one page of a photo of the band. The photo has text drawn from the article accompanying it. I did this because this is typical of a magazine and I wanted it to look like a real double page spread. I also think it gives the reader a stronger image of the bands interview to have their quotes right next to an image of them.
The image I chose again has a look of fairly musical, with the amp, guitar and vinyl. It also is style to make the band look intimidating, no smiling. I did this for same reason as I chose a picture like that for my front cover.
In my double page spread I have an orange background. I picked up the orange using eye dropper tool from the front cover. I did this because I want the magazine to have recurring features as I wanted my magazine to have a stronger sense of being one magazine rather than four pages lifted from anywhere. I also used the same three fonts throughout to try and achieve this.
The article I used for my double page spread was an interview. An interview is a common feature for magazines as fans like to get to know more about their favourite bands, etc. This is why I chose to do an interview. I used words like ‘exclusive’ to make the article sound better, and make the magazine look better. I used two columns of text because this is a layout that looks professional for a magazine, and is an easy layout to read.
Overall I think that the four pages I designed and wrote for my rock/ metal music magazine met the expectations of the genre. I think that the kind of media institution that would distribute my media product would be Bauer, who publish other music magazines like Kerrang! and MOJO and Q. I think the kind of shops that would stock it are newsagents, like WHsmith etc, as music magazines tend to have a wide distrubition especially Kerrang! and NME. The target audience would be a young male audience probably, based on other music magazines like Kerrang!

What I have learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product, is how to use the software InDesign better, which is useful for constructing magazine pages. You can see from the preliminary task that my design skills have improved, I have used a variety of fonts in the final product, better quality pictures and more effects, such as feathering and drop shadow. I planned more thoroughly for my final product, spending more hours working on improving this product than the preliminary task.

Evaluation of Analysis

From all of my analysis, I have decided on some features that I would want to include in my own rock/metal magazine.
Firstly I think that I need a lot of images for my front cover, contents and double page spread. I also need those images to be male orientated, like the ones in Kerrang!
I'm also going to have a colour scheme that is not very bright like the one in the rock/metal magazine i have looked at. It's quite a masculine looking magazine, with bold capital letters and a sans serif font, and I think I will include these features in my magazine.
I'm also going to write a double page spread on rock/metal music, because it is appropriate to the genre of magazine.
From what I have seen of Kerrang! there appears to be a focus on musicians, particularly to glamorise them, and it is often an interview. therefore I will try to do an interview with a musician.. In the front cover image they must look intimidating and cool, probably not smiling and generally representing a rock and roll image, like Matt Heafy on the cover of Kerrang!

Readership

Average issue readership

4500 Kerrang! readers out of 48,887 magazine readers. 4230 in the survey were 15-44.
270 were aged 45+ out of 48,887 magazine readers.
2850 of those are men, 1650 are women
I found this on nrs.co.uk the national readership survey.
From this we can see that the target audience is males from 15-44.
Almost double the readers are men rather than women, and there about 15 times more readers aged 15-44 than 45+.

From the front cover and double age spread I analysed, we could have figured out that this mostly a male orientated magazine, just from the image of the anonymous girl behind Matt Heafy, looking like she is his slave or something, which I talk more about in my analysis.
Also I think there are a lack of feminine features in the magazine, like typically girly colours like pink, images of girly looking women, all the women we see have black hair and tattoos and piercings, generally quite masculine.
There are clues that this is a magazine aimed at a younger audience and these clues are also included in the pieces I have looked at , such as informal language, images of young people,bold colours and fonts to stimulate a young audience, etc.

The reason I think that Kerrang! might have a relativly low readership, is because it is aimed at a younger audience, who have less money to spend than people who are older and have money to spend on magazines. I also think that Kerrang! is not a mainstream magazine, and is specialist to Rock and Metal, so people who dont like the alternative music, probably won't buy it. The mainstream audience is the best to have, like What's On TV with 35,450 readers. However Kerrang! is not a mainstream magazine, and a lot of shops i have been in don't sell Kerrang!

Analysing double page spread

I am now going to analyse Kerrang double page spread. Firstly something very prominent about these pages is that they are they the majority images. I think this shows us that the images are important in this article, as they have a Japanese theme to the article. Their new album is called Shogun which is a Japanese name, and Matt Heafy who we see in this article is half Japanese, so they are playing up to the whole Japanese theme. We see aspects of Japanese culture throughout the double page spread in the symbols behind the font, the geisha in the middle photo and Japanese symbols tattooed on his back. I think they have chosen to follow a theme because it makes the double page spread more engaging to read for the reader, as it is kind of like a story and adds another level to the article rather than just boring questions and a normal photo of the artist.
The images are also quite sexual, which adds to an element of rock and roll the Kerrang likes to portray. Matt Heafy appears. Also this article is promoting the band, and young boys will look up to this image and think they are really cool and glamorous.
It follows a colour scheme so the article is not too messy and we feel we can read it at ease.

Contents of Kerrang!

Now I am going to analyse the contents page. In the contents page we see mostly pictures. Apart from that we have a colour scheme of yellow font that follows on from the front cover, and capital sans serif font. The san serif shows it is a modern, informal magazine. The colours are mostly yellow and red, bright colours that your eyes are drawn to, to give the contents page an impressive image.
There is a slightly larger image for the double page spread, showing it is a worthwhile and important feature of the magazine. There is a white background for the contents because it makes it simpler to look at and find what you need to see. This image in the contents page is an image obviously shot to look scary, we can tell by use of face paint in the picture, the colours red and black of danger, and their facial expressions look crazy. They are also eating food in th epicture, and it shows us perhaps the article will have something to do with food.
The layout is fairly easy to read with the contents table on the right side of the grid and a table of pictures related to key articles taking up a majority of the page. I think this is a good way of presenting the contents, because people can look for pictures of their favourite bands to find the pages about them. Mostly I think Kerrang! Is a very visual magazine, with lots of photos on every page, to stimulate a young audience. The contents page is a good example of this.

Magazine main task

our task is to make a magazine cover, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine. The genre of music i have decided to base my magazine on is rock/metal. The reason i chose this was because i used to read kerrang (the cover i will analyse) so i think i will have a better knowledge of this genre than indie or pop.

Analysing Kerrang! Cover

Rock/metal magazine cover

The magazine fitting my genre that I will be analysing is Kerrang magazine, a weekly magazine.
I am going to talk about the ways in which I think this front cover applies to the genre.

Firstly I think that the large front cover image is typical of the genre. We see a man and a woman covered in tattoos with piercings, so typical metal/ rock style. Neither is smiling, showing a hard, serious attitude.

The camera angle is looking up at the man in the photo which makes him seem more intimidating. I think the photo fits the genre well as it shows attitude, it wants to convey a contrast to pop and the mainstream magazines, where you might see pop stars smiling and inviting you to read. The photo also fits a metal magazine, as it has a photo of a rock star, musician on the front.

Another thing I noticed is the woman on the front cover looks quite subservient to the rock star; she is behind him, slightly out of focus and appears to be giving him a massage. I think this magazine wants to break conventions and go against the rules of political correctness. I also think it shows something about the ‘rock star’ lifestyle, that rock stars are godlike and get loads of women. I think this photo is probably trying to show this about the rock star on the front too.

The text on the cover is always bold and in capitals, suggesting shouting and importance, a kind of in your face font that grabs your attention. The font itself looks chipped away and faded, which I think says something about the metal genre, that its not neat and well presented, and it wants to seem like it doesn’t care how it looks, in contrast to the colourful tidy font on a pop magazine.

The title Kerrang on the cover shows a brand confidence I think, as the woman’s head is covering a lot of the title. I think it shows a stab against the mainstream audience, that this is a magazine for its fans and people who know exactly what they are buying.