HISTORY OF THE MUSIC MAGAZINES

As part of the research for the main task of creating a music magazine front page, contents and double page spread I'm going to look into the history of two current UK music magazines. I've decided that I'm going to look at NME and Q music magazines.

research methods.

Primary research involves the collection of data that doesn't already exist.
examples; questionnaires, interviews and textual analysis.
- I will aim to use this quite a lot as i want my own information about magazines rather than using other peoples for example I will be doing a lot of my own textual analysis of existing magazines.
Secondary research involves the summary and collection of existing research.
examples; internet websites, cenus and books.
- I would use this when its come to things like finding facts and figures about the magazines and also for finding things like definitions, or information about existing material.
Qualitative research is that which involves words or a persons personal response.
Quantitive research is research that can be measured and evaluated to show trends or patterns.

ideology of music

'the ideology of music will affect the design. A pop magazine will use bright, primary colours and smiling pop stars. Rock magazines will be clashing, use aggressive fonts and colours and have grimacing bands, sometimes making rude gestures.'
- Mr Swain

magazine cover terminology.

• title - a name given to a piece of work. This would conventionally appear at the top of the cover.
• sell line - a short, sharp description of the title's main marketing point for example 'Cosmopolitan' has the sell line 'The world's No 1 magazine for young women'.
• splash/burst - an insert on the front cover which contrasts from the original image in order to stand out. 
• menu bar - typically a horizontal bar listing things that can be found in the magazine.
• WOB - white on black on the cover to create contrast.
• dog end - pretend fold on the corner of the page.
• cover lines - one line descriptions of articles found on the cover of the magazine. Their purpose is to entice the reader into buying the magazine.
• boost - the biggest sell line that is intended to increase sales of the magazine.

contents page.

this is the draft of my school magazine content page which is something else as well as the cover that i needed to do for my preliminary task.

 The colour isn't exactly the same as the cover as i did it on a different computer but i would obviously make them match if this was more than a draft to keep the in house colour scheme.

 I also need to put a photo of the editor, me, but i never had any on this computer so I couldn't.

I tried to split all my contents into different sections to make the page easily navigational and i think it worked well. 

I included an action picture of the school football team to accompany the top story 'Libero wins the league' and to also make the page look a bit more interesting rather than just writing.

I re-emphasised the magazine title at the top of the page as I'd seen this done in more commercial magazines like 'Vogue' and really liked it.

I made the page numbers bigger than the words as i think sometimes on contents pages you can't see what page its on and i wanted this to stand out. 

I left the background clear as i thought this made the page look clean and allowed all the words to be clearly read.

hello first draft.

I seriously have way to much time on my hands, but thanks to that, i made the first draft of my school magazine cover!

I've tried to keep a 3 part colour scheme to fit with conventions of typical magazines and I've hopefully kept it.

 I like the photo I've used as the book shows connotations of school and the mid shot also follows typical magazine conventions. Though i dislike it cause its blurry, i tried to fix this with editing and by brightening and contrasting the image but it never worked.

I added a burst in the corner with a competition headline to try to grab the readers attention.

The main headline is 'Libero wins the league!' and I've tried to convey this but making it slightly larger and all capitalised in comparison to the other sell lines.

Not really sure what I'm gonna change about it at the moment but I'm very sure I'll start finding faults. Fun fun.

preliminary task shots!

I think theses are all possible candidates for my front cover image.

I probably wouldn't use this one though as it is too blurry.