This is my Draft 4 for my music magazine, I have watched the screencastify that Miss Hales so kindly created and edited my: front cover, contents page and double page spread in order to maximise the success of my magazine. Below is a list of bullet points as to what I altered in all three pages.

Front Cover:

• For my front cover I have decided to keep the original background colour as blue as the black didn’t look as good.
• I then deleted the images at the top of the page as I didn’t have enough time to gather more images, although this has allowed me to lift the masthead higher creating more space.
• I have then added in an issue, date and price.
• following on from this I have deleted the plug saying ‘ Bring us hip-hops next big star’ as it was taking up space and wasn’t really needed.
• Moreover I have added in more colour to the text adding in red and a gold gradient. The masthead is now gold and the box around the image is gold.
• not to mention I have also changed the inset and plug images to picture of my own.
• At the start of each plug I have increased the size of the first word and thee rest of the text is decreased in size this captures the audiences eyes more.
• The stars name ‘Willem Dyas’ is now larger than the ‘A star in our eyes’ as it looked out of place in the original front cover.
• I have also replaced the plugs with my own stars instead of existing stars.
• Miss said that my typeface shouldn’t look the same as the masthead and have decided to change that to a ‘ Gill Sans Ultra Bold Condensed’ font.
• Finally I have deleted the ‘teaser Pics’ as it had no relevance to my cover.

Contents Page: 

• The headline ‘contents’ for this page is now gold instead of black
• the shape behind the text and the date is now in a light pink, this adds more exuberance to the page and makes the text easier to read.
• Furthermore I have edited the fonts typeface as it was considered ‘Essay like’ as a result of this comment it is no longer a sans serif and in fact is now just a serif font, in doing this tho I have had to rethink my colour choice and it now incorporates white and black in the text.
• I had to correct the word ‘exclusives’ as I spelt it like this: ‘exvlusives’.
• I then had to add a page number to the page to make it look professional.
• Finally I have deleted some of the page numbers to create more room between the page number and the text saying ‘regular’

Double Page Spread:

• For my double page spread the first thing I altered was layout of my columns and stand first, the stand first has now been swapped with the headline so that the text is easier to read.
• Following on from this I resized my image so that it didn’t look stretched.
• The shapes behind the columns had a gap between them that didn’t look right so I filled in the gap in order for the page top look smart.
• I then added in who the article was written by and who it was photographed by.
• I also replaced the text with my actual article.

After finishing these changes I believe my pages were looking much better and added a sense of passion to my work, I was most impressed with the gold gradient that had a personal relationship to my genre; hip-hop.

Targets For Improvement: 

This was my initial article I wrote before Miss Hales gave me some feedback. From my feedback:

• I have realised that Guernsey may not be the correct location for a hip hop tour, the reasons being that Guernsey is seen as a retirement home for the elderly and not a hyped and crazy place that hosts tours.
• I also need to be more clear as to who’s talking as it could be miss leading for the viewer.
• Moreover the article didn’t really flow and seemed rather jumbled, in order to fix this I will have to alter the way I write the article.
• It has been said that I haven’t really given the stars their own personalities, to do this I could give more intense detail into their back stories and how they’ve come so far from school.
• I have also made minor errors in spelling which I will correct.
• Furthermore I occasionally would use the wrong ‘their/there’ in order to achieve maximum success these changes are vital otherwise my article could be seen as unprofessional.
• Finally I talked about the stars being hung over, this may be considered inappropriate for a school magazine and therefore changed it to something more suitable.

I had Alex Tapp proof read my finalised article, this allowed me to see if it all made sense and flowed nicely. After hearing Alex read my article I  believe I could alter some of my punctuation so that the article is easy to read and understand.

Alex has said that not all the words I used made sense, in addition to this I have decided to alter some of the language used to make it clear for the audience to read.

some of my sentences go on for to long in order to fix this I will proof read it and place in full stops and commas where need be.

For this draft I had to upload my most up to date pages and was assigned a partner who was marking my work, in doing this it has allowed me to see the pros and cons of my pages in the eyes of my target audience, this trial has helped me develop my pages and really consider many factors that have helped me create the pages I have today.

For these pages I have moved the plugs on the front cover so that they are not so close to the edge. I also edited the font of the text to make it different from the masthead, furthermore have added in a pug instead of having loads of plugs to give the page a sense of individuality. On my contents page I had already corrected the spelling mistake on ‘exclusive’ My feedback was more positives then negatives meaning there wasn’t much to change, however I can discuss the skills I have learnt from allowing someone else to view my work. Just the simple changes such as moving the plugs away from the edge really entices the readers more as the plugs are more visible and easy to read. A big skill I have managed to accomplish whilst drafting my pages is simply knowing the best composition of my text and images in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the viewers eyes. Going back to my first draft to my most recent has most definitely made me realise that the skills I have obtained along the way have been extremely beneficial.

I am going to be talking about my star duo, as I have got some images that I believe are easy to talk about. An important factor in this article is that the audience are intrigued by the article and will want to know more than the basis of my story. Things that are currently trending are hip hops artists such as: Khaled, Drake, Justin Bieber. My article will start with a simple intro from the interviewer explaining what is going on. one of my images is of the duo at a local cafe this hook will allow me to go into depth on the stuff they are doing in Guernsey.

This is my language analysis of ‘The Beat’ magazine. We have done this  as a way to gain a better idea when coming to create our music magazines, therefore analysing the article is enabling me to see what sort of features I will need to add in my music magazine to attract a certain audience and achieve the best I can. We analyse magazine covers as a way to identify the features we need to maximise the full potential of our magazine covers. Analysing magazines only benefits our understanding that allows us to use conventions from other magazines.

Here is currently how my Front cover, contents page and double page spread look. My biggest flaw as of yet is that my images on my front cover are not mine and need to go out and get more images to replace the current ones, I am also contemplating changing the background colour as I am not grasped by its colour in comparison to the text, moreover I most definitely altering the colour of my plugs, pugs and insets and it is not as eye catching as I once thought.

I am most impressed with my contents page and thoroughly enjoyed making it, the simplicity of the page drives the viewers eyes to the most important feature, the text. I did have thoughts about adding in another plug or pug however believe it would disrupt the eyes of the viewer and distort my page.

Finally within my double page spread I decided to incorporate shapes under the text for two reasons:

1. to make it easier to read for the audience
2. as it gives the page a sense of exuberance.

I also altered the colours of the heading so that the colours would link in with the image.

The first thing I altered on my double page spread was the title name, it was originally ‘Double Page Spread’ I changed it to ‘Girls On Tour’ to give it a sense of realism and to give the audience some specification of whats happening. Furthermore I then decided to add in some shapes with low opacity and layered them behind the text columns to make it easier to read, in addition to that I then changed the captioned image to an image more relevant to the article. It appeared that there was still too much space on the left page so I decided to enlarge my main star image as it as too small.

From this task I now have a vague idea of how I want my double page spread to look, hence why I have included columns with fake text and wrong images to show how it should look. From this i have been given peer feedback on how well I have done.

• Describe the images of the star using adjectives – american, edgy, swag, hip, powerful, domineering, vibrant, cool
• Which cover lines tempt the audience to read on and which ones stand out and why? the cover lines colour is clever as it links in with the american flag, it also stands out and takes up the correct amount of space. Although the name of the coverline should not be ‘Double page spread’
• How do the cover lines reflect a music magazine? If they don’t, which ones need to be adapted? The coverline colour is reasonable however the actual text it’s self is completely wrong and should be altered.
• What aspects do you consider conventional or unconventional? The page is rather conventional and contain a good range of text columns, images and captions. I am intrigued by the layout of your text columns.
• Does the language and register in the headline create enough interest for the reader to commit to reading the copy? Yet again once you have changed the name of your cover I will be able to decide, although colour wise it will attract an audience.
• Is the layout considering where the fold will be in the DPS? As of now it is not fully clear where the fold in your double page spread would be.
• Does the image create enough visual intrigue for the reader to stop turning the page and read more? I think the american flag image is intriguing however i’m not captured by the captioned image.

Targets for improvement: 

Firstly I will be changing the coverline to a better suited name as it is completely wrong, moreover I will then change the captioned image as I have previously used the image. Next I will change the text in the columns to something appropriate. I then may consider adding in some other conventional feature to take up the space.