​NOTEmusic

If I wanted my magazine to look professional and have the best quality it could be, I had to do some research of how that could be achieved. It wouldn't be as simple as just starting the design from scratch straight onto photoshop. I had to think about a variety issues that would potentially get in my way of creating a music magazine for my coursework. Under the heading Research, I put the pages Time Management, Target Audience, Design, Front Cover, Contents Page, and Double Page Spread. I haven't gone into detail below about the Time Management and Design pages as on their own separate pages I set up, there is enough detail about them. Also, I found that if I wrote briefly what they are on here, then it would be too overpowering as they are what they say. Although, the other four pages under Research have a brief part of detail below just so people are able to fully understand what will be there before clicking on.

 

Target Audience

To make my magazine more appealing to a wide audience, I would need to take numerous features into consideration. As I cannot please everyone in my work, I would need to find a specific target audience to direct my music magazine to. To give me an idea of whom I want my target audience to be, I created a survey. The questions consisted of topics such as personal questions, questions on individual music taste and what they would prefer a magazine to include, as well as the price. A range of people answered my survey for this music magazine. The feedback I received from the various responses helped me target an audience. To do this, I combined the results together and decided on the most popular choices. Although, this was altered slightly as some responses had the same amount of people deciding similar answers.

 

Front Cover
Before I wanted to even try to design a front cover page, I knew I had to look at some that were already published and were actual magazine front covers. As imagined, a lot of front covers came up in my research but I ended up having to narrow the results down. The ones that stood out to me the most were the simple covers, those which didn't have too much writing on, yet they were still appealing to a wide audience. A looked at a range of examples and some of the main ones that gave me inspiration are on my Front Cover Examples page. However, even though I wanted to find examples that looked similar to what I wanted, I had to find ones that didn't. That is because they had specific features that attracted me to them, whether it was the way the name of the magazine was presented, or the colour scheme they used. Majority of the magazine front covers I used are very popular in the industry and a lot of people are aware of them. I mainly picked these as they would be a good example to compare mine to. 

 

Contents Page

On my contents page, I wanted the layout to be similar to a few examples that you can see on a separate page under Research yet again. I didn't want the layout to be all over the place, as I wanted it in a specific way before I looked into examples and how I could set them out. I would need to keep in mind other people's opinions and what they would prefer to see as they would be the possible consumers. On top of finding out who my target audience is going to be, I needed to look at content page examples to give me inspiration. By doing this, I get an idea of how real magazines lay out their content page by using different features. I wanted to get inspiration about the various layouts on the text, where they place the title, the style of the images and what content they produce.

 

Double Page Spread

For me, the double page spread would be the hardest part to create on the whole magazine. There are many examples and variations of layouts that professional/real magazines actually use. They can easily look amateur if they aren't done to a quality standard. As I have done with the other two pages, I found a handful of examples that caught my eye and I could potentially use at least one feature that they have.  The examples I found were rather an interview with a celebrity, or an article of someone. I chose these as they were the top two suggestions I received that people would like to. Also, I liked how spread out and laid back some of them look.