Planning

Initial Drafts

Front Cover

I have begun planning my final music magazine, I have finalised my decision and I've decided that I am going to construct a Rock and Roll music magazine. I have decided that I will call my magazine 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' although I may later on choose to change this to the abbreviation 'SRR'. I have hand drawn some drafts of my own music magazine front cover, contents page and article. 

This is my initial draft for my front cover. I have decided to use a preset two coloured background with a grey scale image of a male on the cover. Following this I have compared my hand drawn draft of my own music magazine to 'Vintage Rock' an existing Rock and Roll magazine:

Contents Page

I have continued to use this method whilst developing my drafts for my music magazine. The following image shows the initial draft of my contents page from the same magazine compared to Vintage Rock's. It is very similar and I hope that when drawing up new drafts I can experiment with ways in which I can change this.

Article

Lastly, I have constructed an initial draft of what I hope my article to look like once constructed, I found it a lot harder to write about this, as it's currently quite basic and not that similar to Vintage Rock at all. 

Audience Feedback

After having produced my first hand drawn drafts, I was extremely pleased with the outcome and did not feel the need to produce knew ones, however instead just develop my current ones. I developed them then pushed out a survey monkey by email to my older target audience, in hope that I'd gain feedback on the aesthetic qualities.

 

 

 

Unfortunately only one person responded to my survey when pushed out by email. However luckily enough it was by someone in my primary audience. The feedback I have gained has reassured me that I do not need to reconstruct my hand drawn drafts, but however being extremely careful when constructing it on the computer to make it aesthetically pleasing.

I decided that I wanted there to be more images than text to show the more informal side to the magazine, however this then meant I wanted to include sophisticated language for the older target audience.

Fonts

I have started to look at different fonts I will be incorporating into my magazine on my front cover, contents page and article. I've decided to make mind maps containing previews of different fonts found on dafont.com which I will use for different typefaces such as; Masthead, Tagline and Headline.

Masthead - As my magazine is a Rock and Roll magazine I think the masthead is the typeface that will reveal most about the genre of the magazine, therefore I need to get the best font possible to depict this. I've found numerous fonts that I think depict the genre well and made a mind map out of them, I asked people in my target audience which one they thought was most relevant to the Rock and Roll genre and unanimously people chose 'Disko' so I put a star on the line to it to make it easier for me to identify during the construction of my magazine. Luckily this was also my favourite font out of the choices. I think this depicts the genre well as it's very groovy which reflects the time in which Rock and Roll music was about, it's also similar to the font from the film 'Grease' which is a very famous film set in the 50s (when Rock and Roll was at it's peak).

Tagline - For the tagline I've decided to go for what's considered an 'Old School' font again this is because I think it depicts the genre of Rock and Roll well, by reflecting the time in which the music was most popular. Similarly to my masthead I asked some of the target demographic which font they though was most suitable and they said 'Allstar'. My only concern is that the Masthead and Tagline being two completely different fonts whilst both being fancy could look messy and unprofessional, if this is to happen, I will need to make sure I have a back up font for the Tagline as that is not as significant as the Masthead.

Headline - For the headline I have chosen a basic sans serif font, so that it doesn't clash with both the Masthead and the Tagline, I have not yet chosen which of the fonts that I wish to use and will conduct research to see which is most popular with my target demographic. 

 Article

I have written my article and tried to use appropriate language for the target audience. I will also conduct primary research by allowing members of my target audience to read the article and then fill out a 6 question survey for me.

Written Article

 Audience Feedback

After writing my article, I distributed it to 4 people of different age groups within my target audience (ages 16-50). I provided them with a 6 question survey, so that I could find out if I'd successfully incorporated appropriate language, made it interesting and if they felt involved through direct mode of address. Below you can see the 4 surveys.

Being a female aged 24, this person was actually part of my secondary audience (primary audience being males aged 40-50). It was interesting to see that in fact they thought the article was very strong, and fit for it's purpose. The improvements that they thought I could make was making the article longer, before submitting my final piece, I will look at the article and see where and how I can make it longer, in order to respond to this piece of feedback.

The 16 year old female response surprised me, as I thought that out of all my audience, the younger ones would like their to be less information and more images as they tend to be less interested in reading now a days due to the proliferation in technologies over the years. Again to improve this, I made the article more informative by adding in some excess information about the artist.

This piece of feedback was most important to me, as it was a member of my primary audience, a male aged 46. The male responded extremely well to the article, and didn't think it needed any improvements as it was very fit for the purpose. He added the comment verbally that 'it's brilliant and takes me back'. I was pleased to see that he responded so well to my article.

Finally the last piece of feedback was from a 17 year old female, I was happy to see that she thought the article was strong and effective. With 2/4 giving me ways to improve, I will re-read my article and make any adjustments that need to be made in order to make my work to a higher standard. I'm also pleased to see that the other 2 thought it was very strong and didn't need to make improvements.



Computer Roughs

I have created some computer rough drafts on word, using shapes to show where everything will go. I have also labelled them so that it is clear, what is what. I did this in order to help me get more of an idea of the spacing between them, as the computer space is very different to drawing on A4 paper. On the document it begins with the computer rough of my article, then the contents page and lastly is the front cover. (Although the document is named Front Cover computer draft it does contain them all)

Link to my Computer Roughs

Contact Sheet

I've produced a contact sheet, to show the images that I have taken for my front cover, contents page and article. There are over 150 images from four different shoots that I will narrow down for my construction

Contact Sheet

 

Music Magazine Pitch

Below is a video of my pitch for 'Shake Rattle and Roll' music magazine. By creating and recording this pitch as a video, it enabled me to gain a deeper understanding of what it's like to use technological convergence in order to pitch to media institutions. My pitch involves some stats taken from a sample of people ages 16-19 which enables the institutions to see evidence of a part of my audience research. I felt that creating a video pitch would be more effective as you can show more passion than you could describe in a PowerPoint.