Alterations Made After Feedback

Evaluation: Question 7

Reviewing my prelimary task and evaluating how I have developed my skills and knowledge throughout the project to achieve my final successful product. 

When viewing my prelimary task I feel like my skills to compile a magazine have improved a lot. Firstly I think the music magazine looks a lot more professional and follows the conventions more for a magazine then the college one does. The masthead was not conventional for a magazine as it had a blue background square and border, normally they do not have this. Similarly the feature stories have a background behind the text, I did this because the background was too patterned therefore the text was not clear, but by adding a background this made the magazine not look professional and I think it also made the cover look more cluttered. I took this into consideration when taking my pictures for the front cover, which is why I chose a plain white background, this then made it easy to change colour on Photoshop as her dark clothing stood out from the background. In my first draft I did change the colour of the background but after receiving feedback I kept it white but made the colour stronger as the white background I used from the lighting had a yellow tinge. The placement of the barcode was also not conventional in my college magazine therefore when doing my music magazine I made the barcode smaller and put it at a vertical angle. This made it more realistic to real magazines and was a way I have improved. The placement of the stories on the prelimary task also covered the models up and distracted from the picture, therefore when framing my front cover image I made sure it was a medium-close up which in editing I could then write stories around without interfering too much with the model. I also found that the use of the main story in my college magazine was not clear enough with the main story not clearly been shown to relate to the image. Therefore when doing my music magazine I made sure ‘Delfina’ was in a large font which shows that this is the main story and we can clearly see that the model is called ‘Delfina’.  I have also experimented with more styles of writing in my music magazine by using italic style, bold and changing the colours of different parts in a story this allowed a more professional look and showed more variety in my skills.  I think overall my skills are shown to have significantly improved between my prelimarly task and the main task, this can be shown in the more realistic look the music magazine has and I am really happy with the outcome of this whereas I found I could quite heavily now criticize my college magazine.
Throughout the process of starting the project I found my knowledge and skills have significantly expanded in the following areas: 

Research:
- Learning to compose a LIIAR analysis was part of my planning to effectively look at the way other magazines have successfully reflected their genre and appealed to the audience
- Creating moodboards to collect together an ideology of how my magazine is going to represent my genre through the use of hair, makeup, clothing, possible positions and props. 
- Creating a reader profile which allowed me to decide on my target audience and researching current reader profiles for similar products. Also researching demographics which added to creating my target audience.
- Researching behind the scene shoots of artists who are part of my genre to gather a feel for how production teams conduct photoshoots to achieve successful images. 
- I also looked into the charts and highlighted how many of the songs featured in them are part of my genre to represent the popularity of my genre. 

Terminology:
- Learning and understanding new terminology was an important part to fully understand the magazine industry and what features in the creating of a magazine
- Ideology
- Masthead
- Skyline
- Plug
- Reader profile
- Demographics 

Composition:
- Developing an idea of what was an effective layout for my magazine was vital to creating a professional looking magazine, I did this by creating hand-drawn drafts and then creating digital drafts of these. From physically drawn to digital the drafts changed as once on the computer I found I changed my mind about certain original ideas. Which when creating my final product I found a lot of the layout placement was based on the image and fitting text appropriately around the main image. Which links to image placement and the sizings of images as this was important especially when producing the contents page. The images used on the contents page are smaller than the main image used on the front cover, this is because it includes more images and more information on therefore the placement and size of the images on the contents page took more thought as some images I wanted to stand out more than others.
- The colours used in my magazine did change as I re-drafted my magazine but I felt I learnt throughout doing this what colours worked best and stood out yet still kept the genre of my magazine. 
- Deciding on text font to work with my genre was something I had to tackle, my main aim was to make sure it was clear and read-able therefore I did opt for simpler fonts but believe this was the correct choice as I am happy with the final choices on text font. 
- I had to also decide on what conventions I was going to keep for my magazine and which ones I would leave out. Conventions like the masthead and main images are compulsory for magazines but others like footers, taglines and plugs are not essential and therefore I did decide to leave some of these conventions out which I justified my choices for this in my evaluation.

Photography:
- To take the images I used a DSLR camera. Luckily I have my own which I was quite new to using but had grasped the basics when it came to the photoshoot of my magazine. I did not just have to rely on the camera to produce a successful set of images but also had to set up lighting in the studio. I used three-point lighting which consists of the Key Light (Primary light source), Fill Light (Second light source) and Back Light (Separation light) these work together to create the right conditions for taking an image in artificial light. The key light acts as the main source of light to directly shine onto the model, the fill light acts as a secondary light source to add to this and the back light creates a separation between the model and the background so there is some depth of field to the image. 
- I also learnt about shot types which were useful to develop my knowledge of cinematography and also I could recognise the commonly used shots in music magazines so therefore I was prepared with what shots I would need to take in order to create a professional looking magazine. 
- Shot types also fits in with learning the framing of images as how I framed my image effected what kind of shot I had. I used a medium long-shot for my main image which allows the model to be viewed from the waist upwards so the audience can see her emotion but also get a sense of the fashion she is wearing which reflects the genre. 

PhotoShop:
- This software was a key part to editing and composing my image therefore I significantly developed my skills in this area. 
- I learnt different tools such as: 
      - Lasso tool
      - Magnetic lasso tool
      - Adding text and re-colour, re-sizing and moving it
      - Creating different layers 
      - Locking layers to prevent any further editing to this layer 
      - Levels to balance out the image
      - Brush tool
      - Highlighter tool
      - Eraser
      - Brightness/contrast levels
- These were all really useful for making my image as although complicated and sometimes frustrating to get to grips with through learning the different tools and ways of editing the image they allowed me to edit the image in ways I did not previously have any idea how to do. 

Feedback on first draft of the front cover

Feedback: Click Here

First Front Cover Draft

This is my first draft of my front cover. I personally liked the look of my magazine and think the layout of the magazine is a conventional layout. Although I think the pale pink perhaps does not stand out as much as it could and the grey background blends in with the models top meaning that she does not stand out as much as she would if it was another colour. I think this gives my magazine a 'dull' appearance which I am not happy with because I feel a brighter magazine would appeal more to the audience. This is what I will think about when creating my next draft.

Images Taken For Front Cover

These are the images I took for my front cover. My initial idea was having two people on the front cover as a duo but decided the lighting was not very good on these as they had a pink tinge. I also decided that editing writing onto these for feature stories would be more difficult like it was in my prelimary task were my college magazine had two people on the front cover. With two people on the front both people must equally be shown and I felt the singular images with the brighter lighting was more effective and looked more professional.

Focus Group

This is my focus video. In which I asked questions based around my genre of magazine to gather feedback on ideas. The feedback I recieved on the possible name idea of 'Rapture' was positive so I then went on to finalize the name. The people in my focus group are from my target audience therefore the information they gave is relevant to my music magazine.

Digital Drafts

These are my digital drafts which I will use as a guideline when creating my real magazine. When creating the digital drafts I had to consider the conventions I would need to use. For the front cover it was compulsory to include:
-  Atleast 3 feature stories
- Mast head
- Main story
- A barcode location
- Price
In some of the drafts I also included the following:
- Skyline
- Footer
- Plug

In the first draft, I choose to have the feature stories at one side of the page and the main story separate at the other side to make the page more ordered. I also chose to include a plug to fill space at the top. Doing these drafts also allowed me to experiment with different fonts that I could possibly use. I used an italic style font in the first one so I could see what the effects were by using an italic masthead as opposed to bold or just regular. I chose the second draft to base my front cover on and I drew all focus to the 'Main story' and liked the idea of having this almost centered and the contrast  between the italic and non-italic words emphasied the story as important. I did not use a plug on this one and kept to just three feature stories, on reflection I think this draft could of had a plug or another story featured under the main story so when creating my magazine I will make sure to try and include some more text under this to fill the space. On the last draft I kept most of the text at the bottom of the splash and included the main story at the top to separate it from the feature stories. I made the masthead very bold and large, since the main story and feature stories were smaller. Unlike the second draft were the main story was large and the mast head was more subtle.

When creating the contents page drafts I looked at other magazine contents pages such as the Rolling Stone one I analysed the conventions of. This gave me inspiration for ideas for the layout I could use. I looked at how the different parts of the contents page was sectioned off and the placement of the image. I liked the idea of having the page number big which stands out on the page therefore used this in two of the drafts to see how it could work in different layouts. I tried a 'listing' layout were the stories are more in a traditional contents list. I also tried a more separated look were stories are separated into different sections.

For the double page spread I created three different ones choosing a different look for each one. In one i used the basic layout of having one page a main image then the page next to it with writing on the article and main title, similar to the Rolling Stone double page spread of Lana Del Rey. For the second one I chose to have the writing in the middle of the page and separate the images into the side of the page. I had two columns for the writing and a diagonal divide at the top to allow space for the main story quote/information. For the third one I took inspiration from the Vibe magazines double spread of Solange Knowles where black and white images of her are used as a divider. These images will be where 'Images from shoot' are. The biggest main image is in the oval although this may be changed depending on how 'fit' the image I am going to use is. I decided on this one the name of the artist will be the biggest piece of text and the next biggest will be a quote from the article to attract people to read.