Monday 31 January 2011

Diary Entry Week 4: Magazine Design and Video Interveiws

Monday 28th February- This was the start of me planning out my final music magazine design following on from my draft. On the 28th I started off choosing where I wanted my band to be positioned on the front cover and the colour design; while figuring out the lay out I realised there were a lot of things to take into account. I started off by drawing out the 3 band members in a order which shows their importance; the main singer was at the front and the 2 other band members behind. I decided to go with the idea I had at the start by making the magazine name 'VIVA' appear behind the artists to show I have followed the ideas of NME and MOJO.
Tuesday 1st March- On the second day I carried on with the design of my front cover but focused on the colours and sub headings surrounding my band; which I named The White Fight. The colour scheme I decided to choose was red, white and black as this was the most popular 3 colour scheme that was chosen in my questionnaire. For the sub heading layout I decided to go along the lines of NME and Q which have the artists name and a description below. I chose to have the artists name in black and in a larger font than the description which was in a smaller red font. Afterwards I decided to add some little touches to separate out each sub heading, I did this by using horizontal lines going a 3rd of the way across the page; just to make it look a little bit more interesting.
Wednesday 2nd March- On the 3rd day I focused on my contents page which was the hardest to organize, I wanted to keep it simple and stick to the idea of the NME contents pages. I chose to use a black line to separate out each page description. I then moved on to the smaller contents pages which I made separated by a red line and then used a black line for the next contents. The contents page was probably the easiest page to lay out as i stuck to the ideas of the magazines I analysed.
Thursday 3rd March- I then moved on to my double page spread of my made up band The White Fight, this page was probably my favorite to do my final design for as I really loved my first draft; so I didn't have to make many changes. The few changes I did decide to make were the tree branches to overlap some of the letters of The White Fight; this just made the branches look a little bit more 3D while not detracting any attention away from the band name. I also changed the quote from the band because I thought the other one seemed a little boring and to original.
Friday 4th March- On the final day I videoed my interviews for 5 people (mixed gender), this only took me about 30 minutes to do as I only asked about 6 questions per person. I then put my videos onto the computer and was able to edit the clips together on premier 4.0. This made my clips look a little more professional bu cutting out un-needed parts and fading in and out of clips. I then exported the clip, which unfortunately does take a long time; so I was unable to put my video interviews on my blogger before my diary entry.

Sunday 30 January 2011

Audience Research: Questionnaires

1. What attracts you most to the front cover of a magazine?
- Images: 8 people
- Style of font: 0 people
- Magazine title: 1 person

2. What font style do you most like to see in a magazine?
- Serif : 1 person
- Sans-serif: 1 person
- Both: 7 people

3. How would you prefer a contents page to be laid out?
- Writing on the left and photos to the right: 3 people
- Writing on the right and images on the left: 4 people
- Writing down the middle and images on both sides: 2 people

4. What makes you want to buy a music magazine?
- Images: 3 people
- Stories: 3 people
- Fonts/colours: 0 people
- Who is in the magazine: 3 people
- Price: 0 people

5. How do you like your double page spread to be laid out?
- Image on the left and overlapping onto the next page: 7 people
- Image only on left page and writing on the right hand page: 1 person
- Image going over both pages and writing over the top of image: 1 person

6. Out of these 3 sets of colours which would you be most attracted to?
- Red, White & Black: 7 people
- Blue, White & Black: 1 person
- Green, White & Black: 1 person

7. What price would you be willing to pay for a music magazine?
- £3.00: 5 people
- £4.00: 4 people
- £5.00: 0 people

8. What types of stories do you prefer to read about in a music magazine?
- Interviews: 6 people
- New Releases (songs, albums, new bands etc.) : 2 people
- New artists/on repeat artists: 1 person

Audience Research: Bar Charts

For this bar chart you can see that from the 9 people i interviewed that 7 of them preferred to read about interviews in a music magazine, after reviewing this result I can safely say that my double page spread will be an interview with my band 'The White Fight'. And on the other hand new releases and new artists had one vote a piece; but in my opinion I thought that new releases would have been more popular than in was.



For this bar chart on the price people would be willing to pay for a music magazine, it was quite close between £3.00 and £4.00 but 5 out of 9 people went with £4.00. From this result I have made my magazine the reasonable price of £4.00 which is the average price for a magazine in the market today. From looking at these results I could have given the option of £3.50 instead of £5.00 because I think I may have over estimated on this option.

For this question in my questionnaire I really wanted to get a positive result of one more than the others, as people chose 'image(s)' as the top choice. I was very pleased as I went for this as the main focus point for my music magazine which will hopefully make my magazine look that little bit more professional. Overall one person chose the magazine title which yes is also an attractive part of a music magazine so I will try to make my title also stand out with bold colours.

For this question I was un-sure about adding in the 'both' option as most people in my opinion would choose this because it gives two choices in one option. As I expected the majority went for both Serif and Sans-serif font, but these answers do give me a better idea of what the readers of music magazine prefer to see and read about.

For this question I wanted to be very specific on the answers as the layout for the contents page is very important; as it is the page where the reader can find top stories fast. As this result was close I decided to go with the majority vote as this was the option I would have also gone for, from past research on Rolling Stone and Mojo contents pages.

This question about what makes you want to buy a music magazine was very important, as it provided me with the top 3 reasons why people buy music magazines. Images, stories and who is in it where the top 3 choices and this will be the starting blocks for taking good quality photos, write amazingly gripping stories and include popular band/artist names as the main attraction points.

While analysing this bar chart I could see a definite choice from the questionnaires, the way I only allowed my interviewees to have these specific choices allowed me to get more of an accurate and specific idea of how I will lay out my double page spread. From my magazine draft above this post you can see I took on board this idea of the image on the left and over the centre of the page; this gives my DPS a more eye catching comparison to an actual music magazine.
For this question I wanted to get basically a popular colour scheme for my music magazine that will stand out but also be liked by the reader. As you can see the majority of people chose red, white and black which from my draft above you can see I chose this as it would look best not just from my point of view but also the interviewees. 

In conclusion I would safely say that my interview questions were very specific and covered all the areas needed for my research into front covers, contents pages and double page spreads. I also made sure my questionnaires were given out to both genders to get a wider range of opinions from both boys and girls. Overall I would say I now have a much better idea of what the buyers of music magazines prefer to read, see and hear about; which will make me want to make my magazine the best it can be for the information and the readers enjoyment.

Audience Research: Videos

Friday 28 January 2011

Week 5 Diary Entry: First Cut Music Magazine

Monday 7th March- On the first day I started by opening photo shop and creating my front cover. I had 3 days to get my first cut of this done, which seemed like a long time but I didn't realise that I would have to make a few changes; which took extra time to do. My first oobjective was to decide the font of the magazine title and the layout of the black and white lines one either side and the boxes at the bottom. Both turned out particularly well but I still had a bit of work to do.
Tuesday 8th March- After arranging the lines and boxes I moved onto the varying font styles that would be used to represent each of my bands. This turned out to be hard as I had to find the most effective way to lay them out, without being camouflaged by my magazine image; which I was taking later on in the week. Furthermore that night I went to see Iron & Wine at The Sage Gateshead, which I thought would be a great opportunity to take band photos to add on my magazine; these images turned out really well and will assist me in forming my contents page.
Wednesday 9th March- On the final day of my first cut of my front cover I was just touching up on areas which needed re-sizing or a change of colour; this included my big heading 'The White Fight' which is my made up band. I also started working on my contents page by organising the black lines forming boxes and the page number which would be located on the top left hand corner of each separate box.
Thursday 10th March- For this day I was focusing on my images that would be added on my contents page and how they would be arranged. This included my photo shoot which was of 3 boys who I asked to be in  my band. All the photos turned out particularly well and all I needed to do was photo shop them.
Friday 11th March- On this day I was just re-sizing my images to be placed on my contents and re- ordering the  layers so the band name was above the image. Afterwards I went back to photo shop and selected an image to be used on my contents page of my made up band 'The White Fight'. I used the clone stamp to make the skin look more smoother and gloving and I also used the brightness/contrast tool to lighten up the background so the band would be more eye catching.

Diary Entry Week 6 and 7: Making of Music Magazine Rough Cut

Monday 14th March- On the first day of designing my rough cut I started with my front cover, to guide me through the rough cut stage I used my magazine draft to assist me along the way. Firstly I started with the title, but placed it on the background layer which meant I couldn't move it. However I did like the font style. Secondly I used the line tool to draw red and black lines coming in from the sides of the page, to separate out what would be my sub-headings; this worked really well but did take a long time to do.
Tuesday 15th March- Still working on my front cover I moved on to the banner, which I placed along the bottom of the page. This was tricky to do, as I had to think of a few ideas before I could get it laid out properly but I decided to take out the red triangles as this would take too long to create. To create the 1/2 circle I used the circle shape tool which gave me a full circle, then moved it to the bottom of the page to give me the 1/2 effect. Furthermore I also added text to the sides of the banner by using the text tool, I also use the font icon to change my font, so it would be similar to the others. On Tuesday night I also went to see a band called Iron & Wine who I was planning to take photos of for my contents page, these images turned out really well showing the gig performances in a natural environment.
Wednesday 16th March- After changing the fonts and sizes of the banner, I moved on to the sub- heading text which would be placed on both the right and left hand side. I only used two fonts, the Arial and the Times New Roman so my cover wouldn't look to jumbled, after I worked on getting the sub heading colours correct; by making some red and some black to make the cover more creative. This now formed the basic body for my cover, with only the image left to be transferred on. (photos will be taken on Thursday 10th March)
Thursday 17th March- I now started on my contents page, where I took inspiration from NME and Q. I started by using the shape tool again and inserted a red box along the top fifth of the page. After I added black lines around this box to make the heading more prominent. Following on from this I added 4 square boxes in the bottom 4 fifths where I would be putting band images in. Afterwards I again used the square shape tool to place smaller squares in certain corners, showing what page number the advertised bands would be on; using a mixture of Arial and Times New Roman again as a more modern touch. As Thursday was the day when the white screen was being put up in the media room I took the chance to take my music magazine photos, I started off doing my 3 long shots with the main singer in the middle and the other two band members on either side. Following on from this I then asked my models to do other poses to vary what I put on each page. Furthermore I then started doing the outside shots, backing on to a tree giving off a more urban feel, these images were also long shots to show the bands stance, expressions and clothing.
Friday 18th March- At the end of the first week I was about half way through my contents page, all I needed to add in were my images and a brief interview relating to Lady Gaga. I firstly started by researching into Lady Gaga, seeing if she had a new album out or if she is going through a rough spell. I had a lot to write about which gave me inspiration on what to put in my double page spread interview from The White Fight, this only took me 30 minutes to write giving me the last half of the lesson to photoshop my front cover image. After opening photoshop 4.0 I opened my images and picked out the one which related most to my draft, I had a few to choose from but ended up going for the mid shot of the lead singer (Josh) at the front and drummer and guitarist (Matt and Euan) behind him. Firstly I used the clone stamp to erase any spots or grazes on there faces, then moved on to using the brightness/contrast and Hue to make the image clearer and look more professional. After clicking the tick I then used the arrow keys to accurately move my image just above the bottom banner, while being layering it behind the sub heading text.

Monday 21th March- At the start of the second week of my rough cut  I moved on to photo shopping the two images I was going to use from the gig I went to the Tuesday before. I started off with the Daniel Moore image which needed to be brightened, I used the brightness/contrast and shadow/lightness tools for this edit. I then moved onto my image of the band Iron & Wine which was a lot brighter from the lights that were present at the time. Not much had to be done with this image, apart from cropping it down so it would fit in the contents space provided.
Tuesday 22th March- I was just putting doing some final edits to my contents page e.g. my extra box in the bottom left hand corner and my White Stripes band info box. This took the majority of the lesson to put together.
Wednesday 23th March- I then started on my double page spread by photo shopping the image. I firstly started by fading the right side, to make it look connected to the interveiw. This was a time consuming task as it took time and effort to look professional. Secondly I worked on the heading 'The White Fight', this looked good as the font went with the style of the band. To add an extra touch I made some of the tree branches look like then were coming through the letters, this just added an extra bit of creativity. (But I have now realised the title could be a little larger)
Thursday 24th March- I then moved on to the CD cover design, I chose to make the image saturated and highly contrasted, so it almost blended into the black cover background. This turned out looking really good and the font for 'Heart of Gold'; the CD name looked very good also. I then moved on to the first paragraph pf my interveiw, by giving a breif outline on how the band came about. I researched into owners of music companys e.g. sage and o2 arena to make up a story of how the band were recognised, by doing this it made my story seem a lot more belivable and realistic.
Friday 25th March- I was carrying on with my intervew and started on questions that I would be asking the band. This was harder than I thought, so I got inspiration from looking at 'Freshly Squeezed - channel 4', to see what questions they asked the bands. I decided to put the questions in a red box, so they could stand out while matching the 3 colour scheme.
Monday 28th March (Final day for Rough Cut)- For my final day I only had to write up two ore questions plus the bands answers and organise the collums; as they looked slightly messy. While doing this I experianced some problems with the computer (freezing and saying there is a problem with 'RAM'), this deleted all my work that I hadn't saved earlier maening I had to re-write many questions out again on more than one occasion.
Finally I finished the DPS and only had to transfer all 3 across to the '12C Rough Cuts Folder' which was in the Media Disc Box as a JPEG. After doing so I re-saved another copy of all 3 in my own folder but as a accessable photoshop document, so I could go back and edit for my final draft.

Photo Planning & Locations

Original Images

Live Images for Contents Page                              For my live images I went to a gig at the Sage, Gateshead. The first image is of a support act who was called Daniel Martin Moore, these photos were hard to take as it was low lighting and I wasn't allowed to use flash. On photoshop I changed the lighting and adjusted the contrast to make it more crisp and clear. For my second image the lighting was better as it was a lively song. The photo is of the band I went to see was Iron & Wine. This image was a lot easier to photoshop as it looked relatively good to  begin with. I only really needed to crop the image so it focused mainly on the main singer (Samuel Beam) , I then also needed to re-adjust some lighting and the hue to make the image a little  more colourful.                                                                  
 Image for Front Cover

This image at first was too bright, but I think the lights were at a higher volume to begin with; which I could have fixed. To photoshop this image I reduced the brightness and cut out the background, I also upped the contrast to define the features on Euan (on left) face.





Image for Contents

This 3 person long shot was already good to begin with as I reduced the lights brightness, this made the image look a lot more clearer. Furthermore my main priority with this photo was to use the clone stamp to make the boys skin look a little cleaner and spot free; this worked really well and allowed the readers attention to be focused more on the expressions.







 

Image for Double Page Spread

For my double page spread image I originally started out using a landscape photo which didn't really work out, as it would have needed to be stretched a lot to fill the left hand side of the page. Where as the portrait shot of my band worked a lot better as it filled a good amount of the page up while leaving enough room for the writing. With this shot I needed to do a lot of work as it was slightly to bright, I wanted to clone stamp out the path behind the tree and I needed to fade out the right hand side of the photo. After photoshopping this image looked really striking as a DPS image.

Rough Cuts: Music Magazine (Comparing Both)

Firstly comparing both my draft and rough cut of my music magazine, you can see I have made a few slight changes as photo shopping certain sections would have been to difficult. For example the red triangles surrounding the 'top 10 albums this summer' was to hard to do and would have made the half circle look to crowded and hard to read. Secondly I changed how many artists names were on the bottom banner because this also seemed a little to busy; but I may add in a couple more for my final cut as I think this may look better than my rough cut.
Furthermore I also decided to change the positioning of the artists, as I had a last minute suggestion to have all the band members faces on show as this looked more appealing to the readers.
                                                                                          
Moving onto my contents page where I didn't really make that many changes as I thought my draft layout was very well presented.
The first thing I decided to change was the artists/band names that appeared on my contents, as I was able to get some great photos from a recent gig I went to see. (Iron & Wine) Secondly I decided to add less smaller sub-contents pages  because anymore than 4 would make the whole page overcrowded. Finally I also took the bottom box off which would have had the band 'The Smiths' in, this was because the page looked to infested with bands so I chose to tone it down by adding in a 'EXTRA' box instead.


Onto my double page spread where I did have the odd few image and text changes, firstly I made the band CD cover a lot smaller as it seemed to over power the dominant image. I also changed the quote from the band in the centre of the page, as it didn't seem interesting enough to me. Furthermore I also changed the orange and red colour scheme to red and black, to match in with the main colours of my music magazine; which seems to look a lot better. The bands stances were also changed ever so slightly, as I wanted the singer to have a more open and broad stance compared to the other two members.  

Thursday 27 January 2011

Rough Cut Feedback

   Front Cover

                     Likes                                                                                        Dislikes

- Colour scheme                                                                                     - Empty at top
- Photo/text font                                                                                    - Brightness of photo
- Layout/colour scheme                                                                         - Title
- Photo/bottom banner                                                                           - Darken Image
- Use of 3 colours                                                                                  - More professional font
- Colour scheme/photo                                                                           - Some text is hard to read
- Photo                                                                                                 - Sizes of separation lines
- Positioning of image                                                                            - Banner at top?
- Font                                                                                                   - Faces are too light
- Lines sectioning off headings                                                                - Some text can't be seen
- Bottom banner                                                                                    - Black text is hard to read
- Photo arrangement
- Clean style


                                                                      Contents Page

                     Likes                                                                                       Dislikes

- Big page numbers                                                                               - Over powering 
- Grid layout                                                                                         - Left image is to dark
- Photos                                                                                               - Confusing
- Organised                                                                                          - Structure
- Images                                                                                               - Brighter image
- Use of lines                                                                                        - Magazine at top?
- Colours                                                                                              - 'Extra' text should be serif
- Positioning                                                                                         - More text
- Live pictures                                                                                       - To many fonts                    
- Colour Scheme                                                                                   - Spellings
- Contents heading                                                                                - Other features are hard to read
- Photos                                                                                               - Use other fonts?
- Page numbers



                                                                 Double Page Spread
               
                       Likes                                                                                             Dislikes

- Like album in corner                                                                            - More text to right of page
- Fading image                                                                                      - Title is hard to read
- Red boxes                                                                                          - Could use more professional font
- Trees coming through title                                                                    - Matt(right) could have been closer in
- Layout                                                                                                - Text blends in to trees
- Image                                                                                                 - Quote could be bigger
- Quote                                                                                                 - 'Heart of Gold' in different font
- Album at top                                                                                       - Title can't be read easily
- Title                                                                                                    - Text going over photo
- Good text                                                                                            - Tidy up columns 
- Like the 'Newcomers' at top                                                                  - Title needs work
- Professional CD cover                                                                          - Check language
- Twigs coming through text                                                                   
- Image fades out
- Use of colour in text
- Good bits at bottom

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Diary Entry Week 8 - 10: Final Cut

Week 8
I firstly started by reading through the corrections I needed to do from my teachers and peers. This really gave me a great insight of what my target audience think and if they would be attracted to it. I then started on my front cover where I only had a few minor corrections for example: top 3rd looked to plain, writing was hard to see and image was too bright. This was all easy to change as I had a brief plan of what to do before the lesson.
I secondly moved on to my contents page where I only had 3 changes to make, the majority of my class thought one of my photos was to dark; so I lightened this up by using the brightness/contrast tool.
I also had to change a few fonts as I had to many one one page, which made the magazine look to over crowded.

Week 9
On the second week I had finished my front cover and contents page; which just needed to be checked and fully analysed. All I had to do was my double page spread, which took a lot longer than I thought. I firstly had to make the heading 'The White Fight' a larger font as my feedback stated that the text was hard to read smaller, this meant I needed to delete the text and start again as I erased some of the text to let the branches overlap. I secondly had to tidy up the columns as they looked very messy, to do this was a hassle as I needed to copy the text to a windows document then paste it back to photo shop, and then click 'Ctrl-shift-J' to make the text perfectly parallel. Furthermore I also needed to make my font smaller, which therefore put me in the situation of constructing another paragraph of text to fill up the page. This took more time, but I managed to get it finished by Friday 8th April.

Week 10
For my final week on the music magazine project I had a lot more to do than I first thought. On Monday 11th April I asked my teacher to read through my double page spread to see if it made sense, but I had to make many changes to my interview questions; which would take a lot longer than a lesson to correct. On Wednesday 13th I had finally finished the questions and DPS layout, which made it look a lot more professional. Furthermore the final deadline day was Thursday 14th were I spent most of my time re-reading my band interview and looking for any other layout problems on the front cover and contents. After re-adjusting certain parts on photoshop I saved all 3 of my pages as JPEG's and posted them on the blogger. Finished.

Final Cut of Music Magazine