Music Magazine Production Analysis

Music Magazine Production Analysis

Phase One – The Front Cover

Here I had somebody take a basic photograph of myself against a ruined old building with a demolition fence in front. I did this to give a serious impression that the band itself should be taken seriously and also to give the cover a rural-city-like feel. I made the background image black and white, also adding a bit of brightness to it also. A lot of music magazines I have looked at use this effect too. I then added the sky-line banners, using black bars around 1cm thick. I chose this colour as I didn’t want to drag the reader’s attention away from the photograph which is what I wanted to be the main attraction of the front cover.

The masthead I designed was using a font from dafont.com and then I heavily modified it through the use of filters etc. I added a red background first of all and gave it a black stroke. I then stretched the image out and shortened it at one end at a diagonal angle. I added a drop shadow and then a plastic wrap with additional brightness to the masthead to give it its final look. The music industry is always on the go, I used this phrase for my masthead inspiration. I want to create a masthead that looked like a license plate registration number but also look like the side of a concert truck moving at speed. I began to attach cover-lines to my front cover. Using a serif font in the colours of red and white, the main colour themes of my magazine (particularly) the front cover are red, white and black. This was inspired by Q magazine amongst others. I reversed the colour scheme on the descriptive text below the cover lines, also making them a little smaller as the focus and attention of the reader needs to be on the main cover line first and foremost, rather than the descriptive text.

This is where a lot of the additional cover content came from. I added more cover lines, as well as adding text to the skyline bars at the top and bottom of the page. I used a large/fat sans serif font for the top skyline text. I’m advertising the fact that the magazine is “double-sized” magazine, so I wanted the text to be almost doubled in size somewhat of what it would regularly be. Other than the masthead’s text this is the only sans serif font I have used on the front cover. The rest of the text I have used various serif fonts as I feel they have more of an impact on the reader, especially when it comes to trying to address them on what the magazine features. The final stages of my front cover were adding the dates, price and barcode to an appropriate place. I felt the bottom right corner was the best place for this as the rest of the magazine already had enough content and I didn’t want the cover to look too crowded.

Phase Two – The Contents PageHere I copy and pasted the masthead from the contents page and took some more of the same text using dafont.com to add the contents page text and slogan. As the look and feel of the front cover was rather rural-city etc. I took some brushes that I found on the internet and played with them on the white background a little bit to give the contents page the same feel as the front cover without trying to take the attention away from the pictures and descriptive text that would also be featured on the page.

I added a long vertical red bar with black bars coming out of the right side for the contents page text. I chose this design as it was inspired by various music magazines that I had looked at and researched into over the past few weeks. Plus it went well with the colour theme. I added a texture to the bars with also a brightness tweak to give them the look they currently have. I used a sans serif font for the contents text, using the colour white on the black bars in bold for the headline text and then a smaller black text on the white background for the page descriptions, with the addition to the page numbers on the left hand side where the black bars meet the red vertical bar.

The final additional touches to the contents page were the images as well as the date of the issue and the company website. I turned the images on their side, added black stroke to them as well as a drop shadow so they stick out on the page a little more. Also used the same text as the contents page numbers, I added page numbers to the pictures, but enlarged them to the respectable size.

Phase Three – The Double-Page SpreadI had a very standard black background at first. I found some grunge-rural Photoshop brushes on the internet and began to experiment on the black background. I then added my main double-page image to the left side of the spread giving it a similar look to the front cover image. This time however I made it transparent so it almost fades into the background. I feel that the brushes and the image accommodate themselves very well. I also added text boxes to the right side of the spread as well as leaving space for my headline.

I then created a headline using text from dafont.com and adding a lot of effects, such as opacity and colour change to try and get it to fit well into the rest of the double-page spread. After thinking of appropriate descriptive text– which would match up well with the pull-quote from the front cover and the main cover line – I placed this under the headline before writing up my interview with that band. I wanted the interview to be as realistic as possible. So I did a little research into interviews featured in music magazines from similar bands.