Magazine Evaluation

We had to analyse music magazine covers in out groups in lesson and then had put together some ideas to make our own magazine cover and inside page. We carefully analysed a Hip hop magazine cover and decided for our magazine genre to be RnB. This because we had a lot of gossip and ideas about this genre which we thought could help us rather than making a magazine cover about artists we do not know.
We kept some of the features looking the same to the Hip hop magazine but converted it into RnB, using RnB artists, pictures and quotes. We choose our colours carefully and used bold unisex and attractive colours such as yellow, red and blue, black and white. We used a mixture of font for our text to stand out on the pictures and also for the magazine to look aimed at both men and women.
Our magazine cover yes, does challenge some conventions of music magazines as it has sub genres such as celebrity news, the fashion. We have used our own picture for our magazine, however most RnB magazines have artists representing the magazine cover. Magazines are mostly crowded with lots of sub genres and ideas which you would not find in our magazine cover, we have organized our magazine inside page for it to look more attractive and organized. This is so our magazine looks more unique in its own context. We have still made it suitable for our RnB lover readers with fun, attractive looking headlines.
For our magazine cover we used a font called Hobo std, we used this font for the sub headings with the bold and underline tool selected at size 24pt. For all of our information we used the same font Hobo std but at size 18pt, we also added a web address, issue number and date with Hobo at size 18. We inserted a banner at size 18.36pt with also Hobo std. We also used picture captions and with Hobo std again at size 19pt. For our contents page the titles were size 62 with the font Syncro let, the sub headings were also Syncro at size 24pt. our numberings and information are Century Gothic size 17pt with our picture captions at size 14 pt with the Century Gothic font. We made the important texts larger and additional information smaller to save space on the page.
My music magazine represents a certain social group, the group it represents are young artists who are interested in RnB, alongside people who are inspired to be involved in the RnB industry. I think I would choose EMAP to publish my magazine as they have already top selling magazines. I feel my magazine can gain EMAP many more customers as I find my magazine interesting, attracting and also appealing. My magazine would be sold at only specialised music stores because it is a specialist magazine with unique contexts. 
The audience for my music magazine cover are both men and women who are interested in music. They are aged between 15-30 and probably teenagers to working class people possibly involved with music. I tried to attract this audience by making my magazine look young and Rnbish my inserting suitable images with also headlines of new young artists, bright colours were used to make the magazine look attractive and eye catching.
I have been using photo shop for more than 1 year now which I enjoy using usually every week, but the photo shop we learnt to use is very different to the one I use. I learnt to cut areas out of the picture which we did not want. I also learnt how to use the custom shape tool to make boxes and the stars on the magazine cover. I knew how to use the crop tool, for the contents page we used the gradient tool which we used to make the background look more attractive and different.
Our photo shoot day was not how we expected it to be, we got a couple of pictures which were very useful to use but most of out pictures were for a waste, we took a picture of one of our friends called Miles which had dressed up looking like a celebrity which he looked a bit like Usher, so we took a picture of Miles and used it for our sub topic “RnB celebrity Make overs” we also took pictures of another friend which was wearing a big long gold chain with big DJ headphones which looks like a RnB fan. We used his picture our out other topic “youths in studios” as we thought we could attract young readers who would want to know about studios and their own recordings made in studios. We then went outside of college and asked local people who might look like celebrities if we could take pictures of them for our media coursework.
If I had another chance to do my magazine cover and contents page again, I would add more Rnb looking pictures and lay the page out in some sort of unique way. I would experiment with a lot of font and choose which one is the best that looks Rnbish, bold, young and live. I would use larger ranges of colour and change the way we have set out our contents page. I would not space it out like a poem going from top to bottom and not use the gradient tool for a background. I would research some backgrounds which are shaped in stereos and DJ decks and use a picture like that to complete my background. I really like the speakers we have included on the top of the contents page. We also added a banner at the end but the printer was cutting off the banner, we made sure the page was size A4 but it kept repeating even after 3 times of printing it out. We have had no problems in our magazine making which our only problem was the printing which we could not solve.