Evaluation Question 1

I began by creating a school magazine as my preliminary task, this was to prepare me for the later task of designing a music magazine that could be put on the shelves in any shop and not look out of place.

I learnt a lot from the preliminary, (mainly my incompetence of using Photoshop) however, it really threw me in the deep end and made me learn how to use the tools in Photoshop a lot quicker than if I was learning it at my leisure. Previously I knew nothing of Photoshop or what the software can really enable you to do, I had only heard people talk about it.

My preliminary task was not based upon an existing example as my school doesn't have a school magazine currently so I just thought about it logically. I knew the basic uniformity of a school magazine- school logo, school colours and school uniform- and so I just tried to incorporate these components in the best way that I could.

This is how my preliminary task began. I knew that I wanted to use this photo as it makes the school look studious yet enjoyable. The atmosphere of the school appears to be light due to the smile on her face.

The main problem I found with this photo is that the background was very busy, I learnt how to use the smudge tool which meant I could use the original colour of the walls to go over the tiles and posters placed up on the wall. At the time I did it I was very proud of myself for even thinking about how to do that, but now that I reflect back on it, it wasn't very challenging and I did it quite poorly.

This is the perfect example of my pitiful skills when I first began the preliminary task. I trimmed around the hair trying to make it look realistic, but could never quite get it right.

This is the final version of my preliminary task:

This is how my school magazine ended up looking. At the time of completion I was reasonably happy with it, yet now it only makes me happy to see how far I have developed and how much knowledge I have gained since creating this magazine.

After researching existing music magazines in depth, I began to understand the conventions and uniformities of them- the medium close-up front cover shot, the informal mode of address, the large mastheads in the top-left hand corner, the decreasing font size of coverlines and the typical colour combinations.

This is the title of my contents page. I used the font Bernard MT Condensed as I had formerly used it for parts of my front cover and wanted to stay consistent throughout my magazine. I like this font as it is smooth, sleek and doesn't overcomplicate things. I added a large drop shadow as it made the word come to life and bold. I have found that within the music magazine industry, drop shadows are very frequently used for any feature on a page just so that it doesn't look bland or two dimensional. I also added an outer glow, not because it was a generic convention of a music magazine but because the font colour and the background colour of the contents page looked slightly too tame and dull and so therefore adding a white outlining glow draws attention to it.

This is the masthead I eventually settled for on my magazine. I enjoyed the simplicity of the masthead of i-D magazine. The vibrant colours used in conjunction

with a typically plain sans-serif font create

an eye-catching yet not overpowering masthead.

I found a sans-serif font that suited my personal preference and edited it using the 'noise' tool on Photoshop. 'Noise' is what is commonly found on a television screen when there is no signal. It is a large number of tiny dots of colour that move around very fast. I thought that this had relevance to the media industry because of its connections to the technologies of televisions.

I think this masthead is typical of music magazines written about a certain genre. NME and Kerrang! focus on rock music and therefore I don't believe my masthead reflects that type of music, it has more of an acoustic and potentially pop appearance.

I made a band list for the bottom of the front cover of the magazine. Most (if not all) music magazines have a list of the featured bands either in their contents page or on their front cover, and so therefore I decided to do mine on the front cover. I used an NME front cover for my inspiration for the colour scheme and the idea of using punctuation to segregate each artist:

I used a technique that I discovered on a range of music and other topic magazines. I altered the gradients so that they decrease in intensity as you go down the page. This is a typical convention of existing music magazines as it subconsciously explains to the reader the unspoken order of importance that the coverlines possess. I also decreased the font size of the coverlines as this reinforces the order of importance and the order in which they should be read.
I put an outerglow around each letter to give the words more dimension, really make them jump from the wallpaper used in the background.





I knew that for my contents I wanted a large photo of Megan to be the main focus of the entire page. Here in Spin magazine, I was inspired by the overall layout and format of it. I played upon their key features- such as the coverlines, wording and colours they used- by making them align with how I wanted Riff magazine to look.

This is the main hook of my front cover, it reads 'MEGAN AND THE PAINTERS ON THEIR RECENT STORM TO FAME'. The incorporation of the band's name and a brief few words that summarise the interview and entice the reader to want to learn more is a typical element to most music magazines.


The essential conventions that are absolutely vital for a music magazine to appear genuine are a barcode, date, page number and a unit price. All of which I used in my magazine as often as it was necessary.