First Magazine Evaluation-October 2008

For the first media project I had to design a magazine front cover for one of the issues, as we were put into group of five and each one of us had to produce one cover.

Firstly we performed a photo shoot of the members in our group as the aim was to make ‘stars’ of ourselves. When the photo shoot was done, we had to make a plan for the cover, including magazine title; price; font; font size; genre and the audience.

Our magazine is a rock theme magazine called ‘THUNDER’ and it is targeted at 16-17 years old rock/metal fans. We have chosen such young audience because we thought that teenagers are more obsessed with the music than older fans. The price of our magazine is only ₤2,49 as many teenagers cannot afford magazine for higher price. However to attract even more audience we have decided to give out some free gifts such as posters. In my issue there is a guitar pick.

To represent rock/metal social groups I decided to use dark colours for the background and white/grey for the text. Titles of famous rock bands such as ‘Metallica’ is the addition to it. However the big picture of the rock star that fill up almost the whole cover is the most successful representation of rock/metal social groups as he is wearing black shirt giving the rock finger gesture. Adding this all together gives a clear representation of rock/metal social group.

I tried to design the magazine cover similar to forms and conventions of real music magazine. My cover has all features of real music magazine such as big masthead, sub headings, cover lines and even a bar code. These all features were designed using professional computer software ‘ Adobe Photoshop Elements’ and in my opinion the cover looks professional therefore distributors of rock magazines such as NME or Kerrang would give us a chance.

Making the magazine cover was not only fun but also useful. I never used iMacs before and their operating system therefore it was a challenge for me, but now I have experience in using both.

If I were to make another front cover, I would do all things differently…….because two same covers for two different issues are not that attractive.