Firstly, the name of my music magazine is GRIME TIME. Me and the other member of my group decided to call our magazine GRIME TIME because it clearly states the main genre of music that will be featured in the magazine. We agreed that I would create the first issue of the magazine and he would create the second issue. I didn't want to base my music magazine solely on one genre of music as this would give our magazine a niche market or target audience. So we included other genres in our magazine like Rap, Hip Hop etc.
The name GRIME TIME is also short, straight to the point and it rhymes which would also attract our target audience. We chose not to have a fixed colour scheme for the magazine because we wanted to adjust the colours to match the colours of artist’s clothing in the dominant background image. This would give our magazine a unique style/flavour to differ from other magazines. This idea was inspired by our research of RWD magazine as this music magazine shares the music genres of our magazine; Grime, Rap & Hip Hop.
FRONT COVER:
I decided to follow some of the regular conventions of music magazines when creating my own products. The masthead is featured at the top of my magazine which is usual for all magazines. Throughout the magazines I have used only 3 different fonts to keep some sort of house style. I believe that the font style "Dumbnerd" combined with the red font colour and black outline is effective in portraying the boldness of the magazine through the masthead. The words crisis with the graffiti type font "aaaiight" and the red glow works with the masthead to draw the audience to the magazine. For the issue number, date, tagline, price and caption "Young rapper from North London..." I used the "Berlin Sans FB Demi" font. I believe this font is effective in contrasting with the graffiti fonts I used so that I didn’t have monotonous graffiti on the front cover. I have a price (£1.99), barcode (bottom right corner of my magazine), issue number (bottom left corner of my magazines), date (next to the masthead), story headlines (3 lines across the background image), background image of the Grime artist featured in my magazine (Crisis) and a tagline/slogan (UK's hottest Grime & Rap magazine!). I used all of these features to illustrate my knowledge on the standard codes and conventions of music magazines, so the majority of my front cover doesn't challenge the conventions. The first story headline "is your swagger on point" relates to my target audience as the word "swagger" is a slang term meaning style, attire or dress sense, so that word is something my target audience will recognise. The second story headline "exclusive: interview with crisis" will attract my target audience to read the magazine to find out about this new artist (Crisis) in the Grime scene. The third headline "rapper giggs meets 50 cent" will also attract my target audience because Giggs is a well-known UK rapper and 50 Cent is a famous American rapper. All these 3 headlines do not start with capital letters. I chose not to include some capital letters to make my magazine less formal and to suit my young, cool target audience.
This is how I composed the front cover photo….
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| CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE |
I also added a colour fill effect in the background whilst I was editing the photo to give it a more smooth appearance and make it look professional. I chose this location as I believed the setting was ideal for the effect I wanted on the front cover. I wanted a plain background so that the person in the photo (the artist) would be the main focus of the image. I also believe that bright colours would contrast well against a plain background giving the audience a nice visual experience.
CONTENTS PAGE:
Even though I chose IPC Media to distribute my magazine, I decided not to follow the house style of IPC Media's magazines. This is because I wanted to develop my own style to be associated with my own magazine and this would be another way that I challenge the conventions of existing magazines. The colour scheme I believe my contents page has a more elusive layout than my front cover but the colour scheme of red, grey, black and white is shared on my front cover and contents page. In most real magazines the colour scheme of the front cover is different to the one on the contents page or the appearance is very different. My idea of sharing the colour scheme and fonts gives my magazines contents page a similar appearance to my front cover and creates a unique style, which is what I am aiming for as I stated before.
My contents page includes realistic page numbers, story headlines, a good mix of images and text and. I stated that my page numbers are realistic because each story is a couple of pages at least, giving my magazine a minimum of 45pages. Existing magazines usually contain 50 pages or more to give the reader a variety of things to look at and I believe I achieved this. If my magazine only had a few page numbers this would make it look unrealistic and unprofessional and the magazine would be very thin as it would only be a few pages. The story headlines are also realistic because they relate to the topic of the magazine with the page numbers beside them to inform the audience of the page that a particular story is going to be on. The images on my contents page relate to the story headlines due to the page numbers on them. These page numbers on the images also associate the images with the story headlines. My contents page has a mixture of 50% images and 50% text. I believe this is effective in giving the audience a good visual balance because too many images would make my magazine looks like a picture book and too much text would bore my target audience. (click on the image to enlarge)
DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD:
Like most existing magazines, my double page spread has its own theme and colour scheme which doesn't look similar to any other part of the magazine. As you can see I did keep my main idea of matching the colours on the page to a colour in the image of the artist, in this case the purple and white logo on Crisis' jumper matches the purple and white text I used throughout my double page spread. My double page spread contains one page dominated by an image and the other dominated by text. I believe my double page spread is roughly 50% imagery and 50% text because the page on the left (page 10) is taken up by a large image with a small amount of text, while page 11 is mainly taken up by columns of text with a small image of 'Crisis' in the studio. I used this image here with the text to break the monotony of having just text filling up a whole page. The page numbers on these two pages also relate with the page numbers I stated in my contents page which is why my magazine is realistic.
The mid-shot of Crisis on page 10 should attract my target audience to read about him as they will not recognise him (because he is a new Grime artist on the scene) and they will want to find out about him; this is how I aimed to draw the reader in. I used this image on the left page instead of the right because people in the UK read from left-right so the first thing they will notice when opening the magazine to page 10 is the large image of Crisis. I added the interview section next to the page with the image of Crisis so that the audience automatically know who is going to be interviewed in this article. I came up with all of the questions myself with the help of my research on the Double Page Spreads of RWD Magazine.
I believe that my double spread also had a good balance between text and images, just like my contents page (as I stated before in the analysis of my contents page). All the questions in the interview section are related to music, with a few personal questions about the artist's life/background appeal to reader so they feel like they are getting to know this artist/band in a way they couldn’t find out about him anywhere else hence the term "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:". An example of a personal question that I included in the interview of Crisis would be "Is there a Mrs Crisis in your life?" Although this may not relate to music members of my target audience (mainly his fans) will want to know a little personal information about Crisis.
My double page spread also includes a quote from the artist on the artist's image and an album release date. My idea was to put a quote from an artist/band next to an image of that artist/band. I wanted to make this a regular aspect in the double page spreads of my magazine issues because the audience will read the quote before they read the interview section. This quote will give the reader some idea of who the artist is before they begin to read question and answer section (interview) in my magazine. The album release date bubble is another feature I wanted to make a regular aspect in my magazines issues, so that every different artist or band that I interview can immediately inform my target audience on their latest single, album, mixtape or music video that is out. I believe these two features do not challenge the regular conventions of real music magazines because current music magazines have similar features to this.
Overall, my double page spread follows and doesn't really challenge the conventions of a normal double page spread in a music magazine. On the whole, all 3 of my magazine products (front cover, contents and double page spread) don’t challenge the regular codes and conventions of music magazine because the majority of features I have used on them are usually found in real magazines.
This is how I composed the photo for my double page spread...
