Thursday, 31 March 2011

Drafts/Progress







Here some of my original drafts, and some images showing the progress I made towards them. These show my original ideas of the magazine, and the extent to which they changed becomes clear when you look at my final products. In this original design of my front cover, you can see minor differences in the background fog, and faded black edging. I eventually decided that it looked better without the extra fog, and with the black fade, before I decided to use a different image for my final product.
There are also some p
Photoshop images of when I was adding the Cover Lines.

Original Images





Thursday, 27 January 2011

Qu 6:What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

From constructing my products, one of the technologies I have learned about is Photography. I Have never really took "serious" photos before so this was new for me. I used a high quality Olympus camera to take my photos, and I watched a 10 minute DVD that came with the camera in order to use it effectively. One of the keys things I learned is to make sure you take a lot of photos, certainly a lot more than you need. Even if you think one photo looks perfect, it's always best to take several more anyway just in case your other Photo does not turn out quite as good as you think. The more Photos you take, the more chance you have of getting one that you want. On the night I went out with my friend to take photos, I took 25 photos and only used 4 of them (The others were photos I had previously taken of friends). Two of the 4 I used were not the photos I originally planned to use, but actually turned out better. This is why it is so valuable to take considerably more photos than you think you will need. Unless you have a particularly specific idea in mind, I would also consider it important to take photos with a variety of backgrounds. The genre of my music fits in with an "urban" look, and I live in a small country village, so I had to think about my locations a little more carefully. To start with, I took photos looking down a road. We then moved to some garages, and then to the factory which is also conveniently placed in my village. These locations gave me the urban look I needed. Since the factory had a lot of lights, it was also better to do that photo shoot at night, when it was dark.

Two of the internet applications I have had to use and learn are Flickr and Blogger. I had never used ether of these websites nor anything similar, so they have both been a new experience for me.

Although a little confusing at first, I learned the layout of blogger quite quick and I am now very comfortable with using it. The most important things I have learned would be how to use "Labels" and generally finding my way around the website. Since blogger is the website which my entire project is on, it has allowed me to keep adding things as I go along, which is very important. One distinct disadvantage of using a free blog hosting website would be the picture size limit. In my Final products section, my Products are somewhat compressed, and therefore have lost some of their quality. Also, in these sections where you add you your blog, they way in which you add and organize photos is very awkward. You cannot place a photo exactly where you want it, and sometimes the photo will be in a different place within the "Edit" screen than it is when you look and the published version on the blog. Overall however, blogger has given me all the options I to create my project.

Flickr has also been useful for annotating photos. As I write this I have not used it all that much, but when I have done it has been very simple to use. Like Blogger, I had never used a website like Flickr before - but it is very simple to import photos and annotate them effectively. I have used ti to annotate my own projects aswell as other magazines and it has broadened my knowledge of the websites available for a project such as this.

As mentioned in my "Skills Development" section, I have also learned a lot about Adobe Photoshop CS4. Before this project, I had only very briefly used it and thus was not capable of creating professional looking pieces of work. Now I am capable of doing so, and I am very comfortable with using Photoshop. Most of the things I have learned I have learned from just using Photoshop and finding things out by myself, or by using Google.

Google has also helped me in this project. I have used it to search for many things, including institutional data, photos for my Moodboard, and other information and help about target audiences. I also used google to find out about Vibe magazine in the first place, which has been an influence throughout my project.


Thursday, 16 December 2010

Font Ideas


For the Masthead font, I think I will use either Birth Of a Hero, Sterofildelic, or Trashco. This is because these fonts seems to be the most interesting, yet appropriate. I did think of using a more Standard font Like Vibe does, but after looking at these fonts (particularly Birth Of A Hero) I feel that these will work better for my magazine, which is aimed at a slightly younger audience than Vibe.

For sub-titles and front cover titles I think I will use CopperPlate Gothic Bold since it seems to look good when In a bigger font, but not so good when smaller - for my smaller writing I think I will use Gill Sans MT or Arial, since these are standard fonts which are very easy on the eye.

Wednesday, 15 December 2010

Full Analysis of Vibe Magazine Oct/Nov '10

In my opinion the magazine as a whole is a very good one, and has a great style which has given me something to work alongside when making my own magazine. You can see my Analysis of Front cover, contents page and feature articles to see what I thought of the style of those specific parts. Despite is great style and appealing looks, I think that the magazine is a little to confusing as to what things are and where they are. This is partly to do with a confusing contents page - which is split over 2 pages, with adverts in between, and doesn't seem to cover everything (although it probably does). Not only this, but the amount of adverts is the magazine is huge, especially near the start. I feel that the adverts could have been all before the contents page, or all after it, and the magazine could have much more defined sections to make it less confusing.

I think it would help if the contents pages did not have adverts in between and were next to each other, and also if the title pages for each 'section' were a little more clear. For example, for one section called "The Splurge" there is an advert for books on the left page, and then the main picture on the splurge page is a TV, which makes the page look like an advert itself. Then, when you go into this section, it is laid out as 'Page,ad,page,ad,page,ad' and only a few pages further in are there any pages at all which manage a double page spread without seeing an advert. When you get to these sections, the magazine starts to look good, but with adverts every other page it gets confusing and un-attractive to read.

The magazine is clearly aimed at Middle class Males around the age of 25-35, but also at aspirational people at the 18-30 range. On vibe's website (Which is the company, not just the magazine) they say that "
The new Vibe is the premier destination for urban music, entertainment, culture and lifestyle for the aspirational 18-34 year old." You can tell this by the way the articles, pages and adverts are - The contents pages feature one person dressed in designer clothes on each page, all the adverts are for things such as cars in the £20,000-40,000 range, designer clothes and perfumes. Some of the articles are about very expensive things themselves; one section is about fashion and features a $200 bow tie. Most articles and interviews feature a lot of writing, which also suggests a more educated audience. This can be compared with something like The Sun newspaper, which features and lot of pictures and minimal amounts of writing and is not aimed at such an educated, intelligent audience.

However, you can tell from it's style that it is aimed at a younger audience. For a start, the type of music that this magazine is about is usually liked by younger audiences anyway (RnB,Rap, Hip Hip) and this is further illustrated on the front cover, where you see Usher, and Usher only. The word "Usher" also appears on the front cover with a small quote from him, to further clarify who it is - you can probably tell just with a glance if this magazine is about the type of music you like just from a glance at it. It adopts a sort of "Smart-Casual" style, in which it looks professional, but certainly not Formal. Throughout the magazine, whether it is an article, contents page, front cover, interview, special feature, it keeps the same type of style in which writing varies in colour, size and format, but only on a small scale. For example. the front cover involves only 2 colours of writing - yellow and white. On a feature article I have talked about the only colours are white,red, and black. By doing things like this, the articles always look interesting, but still maintain a professional and casual look.

Thursday, 2 December 2010

Feature Articles - Ideas and Analysis of Others

In the October/November issue of Vibe magazine, there are 2 very different types of feature article. Although neither of them would be the style I am looking for, I could use ideas from them both to help me with my feature article.
One of the feature articles is to do with twitter, and more specifically, what famous artists have been tweeting lately. The article is colourful and visually attractive - it uses and very simple blue/white colour palette which works well, and the layout is good too, with rounded boxes, rounded pictures and once again - varied text size. Although this is not the type of article I will be doing, (Mine will be more like an interview) there are defiantly things that I could use from this article to make my article better. In the rounded boxes there are specific bits of information aside from everyones tweets - there is a box about Kanye West joining twitter, a story about FABOLOUS and T-pain, and 'displays of public affection,' of course, all on twitter. In between and around all these boxes are the tweets themselves. The name of the person tweeting is in bold white letters, and the tweets themselves are in standard white letters. Some of the tweets have a small picture next to them, and these tweets have a bigger font size as they are most important/funny/controversial tweets. The variation of Short stories, tweets, pictures and small bits of text keep this page interesting and appealing to look at. With a layout like this, is does not seem a chore to read a lot of writing, since it is all spread out, varied and with a good colour scheme.

The other article is an interview with "Soulja Boy." It's very much a simple article, which is laid out nicely and will appeal to people who are interested in reading about him. It is a 6 page article, and has an "order" of picture, writing, picture, writing. The main background colour is a plain white, and the only other colours in the article are white and red (aside from the pictures) This is very much a colour scheme which I am interested in for the magazine generally, since it is kept simple, but because the background is white it makes the simple colours stand out.

For the first page, there is a title which says "Life of a shooting star" which takes up half of the first page. It is a centered title in a graffiti style writing, which large speech marks and a stylish underline. Under the title is a short sentence which gives an overview of what the article is about - this is written in black. Further below this is the name of the writer and photographer, with a little symbol so you know which person is which - This is in red writing. When the article begins, the first sentence is "Soulja Boy is boiling inside." The 'S' takes up three lines, and his entire name is in red before the rest of the article is in black. From what I have just said, you can see how the page is varied in it's simple colours and styles to keep the page looking interesting, and this is what I would like my article to be like - very simple, not to many colours, but interesting due to varied colours, font sizes and shapes.

On the other 2 'writing' pages, the page is essentially filled with writing, all apart from in the middle in the page, where there is a quote. This is obviously one of the most interesting quotes from the page, and once again, is colour is varying. It has large red speech marks, the middle of the quote is red, with the start and end of the quote being black. Once again, this makes what is essentially a small bit of writing in the middle of a page full of writing, look like an interesting variant to the page. Also, every time a new subject is started in the writing, the start of the paragraph is emboldened and in capital letters.

Wednesday, 1 December 2010

Mood Board and analysis of Target Audience

This moodboard I have created is one for my magazine, but also slightly based on Vibe magazine, since I want them to appeal to roughly the same audience. I got this quote directly from Vibe's website:

"The new Vibe is the premier destination for urban music, entertainment, culture and lifestyle for the aspirational 18-34 year old."

The items/people on the moodboard represent what these people are likely to enjoy, like, eat, play etc. Since it is aimed a a young age group (And my magazine may have a slightly younger target audience, perhaps 15-30) I have things like video games, and food like Mcdonalds, as younger people so do enjoy these things more than older age groups. I have a picture of Usher and Eminem to represent the kind of music my readers would like, to represent that my magazine is aimed more towards Males, and also to represent that my magazine is aimed at and black and white people, not just black people who are usually associated with this type of music.

My target audience in terms of class will be B,C1,C2, as it says on my moodboard. Those who are middle class may be to afford some of the things that the C1/C2 are aspiring to get, but they will all want roughly the same things that the moodbaord suggests. For example, the B class readers may be able to afford the designer clothes on the Moodbaord, but the C2 class may not - but the C2 class would still want them, which is what the readers would have in common regardless of class.

Demographics:
Band: B,C1,C2
Age: 15-30
Mainly Male Readership: 90% male, 10% female
Single 65%, Living with partner 25%, married 10%
Students/graduates/Young Single Men