Front covers

This is my origional flat plan for the front cover of my music magazine. I have tried to use as many techniques as possible that are usually assiociated with muisc magazines. Yet in order to enable higher sales, i have used less noticable devices to give my magazine its own identities.




In more popular music magazines such as "Rocksound" and "NME" the masthead in which the brand logo is placed is usually located at the top of the magazine. Yet in my magazine i have placed an actual artical at the very top of the page from left to right. This represents the way that many nationalaties (mainly the UK and U.S0) read and they would represent a large proportion of my traget audience due to the fact that it is the English language. The reason that i have placed an article at the very top of the magazine is to seperate it from other magazines in terms of layout. It also allows my brand logo to be located slightly closer to the middle of the page in which at a glance is what readers are drawn to first (before they start to look at it closely) which helps establish my brand in their mind if they were only looking at magazines on store shelf. Whilst this technique is uncommon amongst popular music magazines, it is used by some in order to change the layout and make the magazine seem busier by placing as many articles as they can in as many spaces that they can in order to attempt to sell the magazine as it looks like they have more stories than other magazines; this also provides another reason as to why i have decided to place an article and use it almost as a masthead.




My brand of magazine is named NOISE music magazine. I have decided to use balck disorted, fading writing in an attempt to classify it as a rock magazine. I have also placed it in a white box with my main picture located underneath. This helps the brand logo stand out from the rest of the magazine, thus drawing you towards it and helping establish it in the readers mind. I have decided to place the name of my band (Urban Mondays) directly in the middle of my magazine in an attempt to make it the center of attention. I am still undecided on the colours of the boxes surrounding them but i would like to make it stand out from the picture to connote that this band stand out and are different from any other band that there is at the moment. Urban Mondays is my Main flash with a sub-heading of "Rock's new hotshots" This implies the type of the magazine thatt this is, as does the brand logo of NOISE implying that it is a rock magazine. It also shows us that this band is an up and coming talent, which indicates that we would be looking ahead into the new year as it is a december addition of the magazine.




Both brand logos and main flashes are commonly used in any form of magazine and they usually indicate the genre of my magazine, i feel that "NOISE" and "Rock's new hotshots" clearly defines my magazine under the genre of rock. Along with brand logos and main flashes another item always found on magazines are dates, issues and bracodes. They aren't what attract readers to a magazine but it formalises one and helps make it sellable and in this case seem exactly how a magazine should look. Yet stupidley i left them out so when it comes to my actual front cover i must remember to include them. Along with main flashes there are also many main sells amongst magazines, these are generally lesser and smaller stories that indicate content and personality of the magazine. Since my magazine is a rock one it is important that the "lesser stories" are related to rock. I have decided on using actual rock bands in an attempt to establish the rock theme in my magazine. "Fallout Boy: The West Coast Smokers Reveal All" is one of my main sells. Fallout Boy are a popular rock band, with "West Coast Smokers" being one of their songs. This is only something that rock fans would understand as they would be the only ones who know the song, thus identifying them as my target audience. With my main flash i had the writing placed diagonally to indicate a younger audience, but for the main sells, i have located one by the image and the others (which are merely names of bands as i feel that my target audience won't need a specific story realted to them yet as they will want to read about those bands anyway, so i don't necessiraly need a story with those bands yet (but i will include them on the contents). This keeps the attention on the Main flash as there isn't too many stories circling it so that it is clear which one is the main flash. I have decided on not using a strapline as i found that when looking at rock magazines there weren't too many of them indicating that it isn't something that affects whether or not the magazines are brought, so i felt that it was insignifficant.

Here is my completed version of my magazine front cover. I have kept to my origional flat plan but made a few changes that i feel have benifitted the magazines look. In my analysis here i will mainly look at colour and type and explain where and why I've used certain colours and fonts. But firstly i will explain the use of imagery. I have made sure that there is no real sign of emotions on the faces of my "Rockstars" to indicate that they are serious, rather than happy due to the fact that rock music isn't associated with happiness. There clothes that they are wearing are suggestive due to the fact that they fall under the middle class wardrobe, it shows that they aren't rich (as they've only just come onto the scene, hence "Rock's new hotshots) and that they aren't extremley poor but could do with some money. The use of the brick wall as the background links with the connotations of their name "Urban Mondays" it provides a city establishment, and rock is also assiciated with urban territory as it sounds louder and more sharp, which you wouldn't expect in the countryside. Yet in using this picture I encountered a few problems, firstly it was rather pictualeted which lead me to wonder if i should use another image, this invloved the tedious approach of using photoshop and endless amounts of cropping, but eventually i managed to get it how i wanted to. Yet the colour scheme and clothing meant that i had to play around with the colour and size of the text; especially my main flash which had to be rearranged many times with different forn sizes and colour to make sure it was readable. Luckily i encoured the same problem on my preliminary task so it wasn't as hard as it could have been if i hadn't done it before. The use of the brick wall and rather darke colours such as brown and black made my brand logo stand out even more on it's white background, so the reader is drwan to it more. Yet unfortunatly it meant that one of the band members had part of his head underneath it and I was too tired of playing around with the layout so i left it how it was, maybe if i had more time i would have attempted to change it but i don't believe that it affects the image and the magazine as a whole too much.

On the use of the brickwork i noticed that it was almost different shades of brown with the dark brown as the brick and a very light brown used as cement in between. This provided me with the inspiration of the use of red and yellow to seperate it the Main flash from the rest of the page. Whilst they stand out from the page it also keeps the connotations of the urban area and keeps the link with the name of the band going. As i mentioned earlier I used a disorted faded font for the brand logo, which was called dirty headline. Not only does it include connotations of rock genre, it also seperates it from the rest of the text on the page. The fonts that were used for the main flash and the sub-headings wer mainly headline one and two. These two fonts are pure standard sans serif fonts, with varying size of fonts. I've also had to play around with the use of tracking (spaces between letters) to get them to fill the right spaces such as the "XMAS" article in which the two lines of righting had to be altered in order to fill the space provided. The use of the red background for this article ensures there isn't too many colours on my front cover, this could be used as a pattern or layout that occurs over many issues of my magazine, it would be that i only use those colours for the main flashes main sells and background colours. The reasons that i have chosen to use these colours is for the following: they are all sub-urban colours i.e no green representing the countryside. Also the use of black on white and vise a versa helps the text stand out, which makes it easy to read, this classes as legibility. I have decided against using bold or italics as i didn't want to seperate the stories too much as it would make one stand out more than the other. The use of red also holds connotations of danger, and passion which is usually associated with rock music. Yet the colour of yellow that i have used for "Urban Mondays" isn't usually used in rock music, as it has connotations with children. Yet in order to keep the urban theme going i decided to use it and i believe that it has worked well.

I have now added a date, issue and barcode to formalise my magazine, and it gives relevance to some of my articles in the magazine. As it is the December issue it shows that it is a monthly edition magazine and that it is also celebrating Christmas so it adds relevancy to the articles, it would also apply for the August addition where there may be articles on Summer. Barcodes on magazines are usually located on the bottom of the page, yet due to the lack of space i have had to put it nearer the top, whilst it isn't the most conveniant place it seperates the format and layout of my magazine to that of others such as NME or Rocksound.