Different Parts of a Magazine Cover

Magazine Comparisons Front Cover & Contents

Logos

Magazine Evaluation

Music Magazine Article

Evaluation.

For this project I had to design my own magazine front cover, contents page and article. For this I had to pick to cover music or fashion. I chose music as I read more music magazines than fashion ones. For the article I had to produce an introduction, 8 questions and a conclusion. All of these had to be a minimum of 100 words. This project took around a month to complete. I first wrote up the article and then took the images. I think this was a good order to do things as the article took longer to do than taking the images and editing. I kept the editing quite subtle. I just upped the brightness and took the contrast down a little bit to make the models hair stand out more and come across as brighter and then just played around with the colour balance but nothing to make it unrealistic as I wanted to keep it looking classy.

As we had to take our own images, we had a lot of freedom with this. I chose to take my images against a white background as I wanted my magazine to be quite sophisticated and clean, I didn’t want it looking too cluttered. To suit the personality of my model, on the pictures she’s quite reserved and from looking at the pictures you can’t really tell her personality. The image I’ve used for the front cover is the image that everybody is going to see first so I wanted it to be quite stand out ish so I chose an image of her staring the camera down to try and describe the vibe she gives off. Quite blunt and confident.

I experimented with all different angles so I had a variety of images to choose from. All together I took around 40 images. I edited and used six of these images in total.

I found this project relatively easy to do but if I was to do it again, there are some things I would change. The first thing I would change is the font on the front cover. I like it but if I had the chance to change it then I’d pick a clearer one to use. The other thing I’d change is my images, I think they would have looked good against a background for example a forest type photoshoot where it’s still quite simple yet there would be a bit more going on and it would fit in with the theme.

Magazine

Magazine Front Cover.

Music Images Contact Sheets

Here I took pictures of Emily who was being my model for the shoot. I shot these in the studio against a white clear background. I will go on to edit these on Photoshop and use my selected ones for my magazine front cover and article.

Magazine Photoshoot Review

As I had to create a magazine front cover, I needed to first take a good rang of images to feature on both the front of the magazine and on the contents page. I wanted to be realistic about it and having looked at magazine front covers and interviews that feature in music magazines (my chosen magazine style) I saw that they usually show images of them sat down in mid conversation so I took a range of images like this to make it look more realistic. All together I took about 40 images. I took the images against a white background as I wanted the attention to solely be on the person in the picture, not the background, I also didn't want it to over power the actual front cover of the magazine. I will have one big image of Emily on the front cover and then for the main article of my magazine I will have smaller images of her in mid conversation and sat with her guitar to make it more realistic.

Music Magazine Fonts

Questionnaire & Results of Magazine Design Survey.

JL 02 Task 2 Magazine Front Cover and Contents Page.

Magazine Article.

Alexa May

The next big thing?

Here today I have Alexa May, the next big thing for sure! Over the past 6 months she has brought the music scene by storm at the mere young age of 19. She’s got herself a bit of a reputation of being quite aggressive and outspoken if she doesn’t like what she hears, this should be fun! Her first single, Light Them High went straight to number 1 and stayed there for an impressive six weeks. Surprising critics with her haunting and captivating music. She’s caused uproar already in saying that boy bands these days are “singing ridiculous things just for money”. I’m going to be getting up close and personal with her and try get to know abit more abit the mystery herself!

1)       What inspired your style of music?

Laura Marling and Marina Diamandis have been a big influence as personally I think they have actual meaning to their songs and not just the crap that’s usually in the charts and they stay out of the media like me really; they just don’t give a shit about what people think and I think that’s pretty great. Laura Marling needs more recognition though, seriously! The sort of songs she writes and the way she gets them across is insane!

2)      What’s the story behind your first album?

There’s not really any story there at all. I wrote what I was going through at the time. It was sort of a diary for me and just a way I could air my thoughts without actually speaking about them. Nothing in particular was happening in my life at the time I started writing the album, nothing that heavily influenced the album anyway. Just everyday things, nothing life changing, that’s for sure.

3)      You’ve caused quite abit of controversy with your opinions. Did the media change the way you wanted to be perceived?

Oh yeah, most definitely. These days there are far too many media personalities about. You cannot call yourself an artist if you get people to write the music for you. Why would anybody possibly want to be like that? It’s beyond me, anyway. If you don’t like my music, so be it, I don’t really care. I like my music and that’s all that matters to me. They don’t have to listen to it, do they? But yeah it is nice being recognised in a positive way anyway. It gets a bit weird when people I don’t even know are criticizing my appearance. That sucks.

4)     Well they don’t have much of a choice but to listen to your music, it’s on everywhere at the moment! So, was music a big influence in your life growing up?

It was actually yeah. I had music lessons from the age of 5, I think. At first it was more of a thing that my parents got me into, to be honest at that point I had no interest in it, I mean I was just a little kid. But yeah when I got to the age of like 10 or whatever I really started to love it. I’m glad I got into music young anyway. Thank god for my pushy parents! No if they hadn’t of made me go to the lessons and all of that then God knows if I’d be doing this now.

5)      Do you like the music that’s in the chart at the moments?

That’s a tricky question, I do like some of the music in the charts, I was really surprised that my album even got anywhere near the charts as it’s not the kinda thing that is usually in there. Some of it’s really catchy but I do really struggle to praise and like people who don’t create the music and lyrics themselves. I can’t praise people that do nothing. But in regards of whether the songs are catchy are not, yeah they are. Actually I was really pleasantly surprised when Marina & The Diamonds got number 1 album. That was good.

 6)     What music did you like growing up?

I LOVED artists such as Etta James and Eva Cassidy. Their voices were just so addictive, still are. They’re very chilled. I don’t actually know anybody that didn’t like those two!

7)      What are your plans next?

My plans are just, not to have a plan at the moment. The media is still going crazy so I just want them to enjoy my first album and not overlook it by starting on anything new. I will start something new in the near future though, after everything has died down a bit. I’ve noticed my album has got a really mixed response and while people are being extremely lovely about my album, you do get the ones that put you down. There’s constructive criticism and then there’s people who are just going out of their way to put you down, so yeah, a bit of time out of the limelight will be good.

8)     Who would you most like to collaborate with?        

Probably Marina & the Diamonds or Lana Del Rey. They’re just certain of themselves and some of their songs are the best I’ve ever heard, to be honest and of course they handle themselves in a certain way and the years they’ve been around they haven’t seemed to of changed in any way, for the media anyway in terms of their songs anyway. So yeah, that’d be really cool to do.

Quite abrupt at first meet, Alexa May comes across as quite stand-off ish yet she’s actually just very reserved and blunt. She doesn’t want to be perceived in the wrong way by the media. Not one to take compliments, she’ll tell us how it is and doesn’t seem to want or care for our approval! She comes across years ahead of her age. She’s very reluctant to fall into the mainstream charts category. With her gloomy nature and abrupt manner, there’s not much chance of that, Alexa! I think there’s much more to come from her.