For this task I recreated one of NME’s magazine covers, the edition I decided to use had Kendrick Lamar as a cover star. The magazine had all of the conventional features for a hip hop magazine, therefore I thought it was a good idea to try and take inspiration from a poster that was designed so well.

Doing this task really helped me develop my skills on indesign, which is important as I am going to create my own music magazine cover in the future. This task also benefited me as I was able to see what goes into making a good magazine cover.

Below are the two magazine covers, My attempt (left) and NME’s (right):

One of the problems that I encountered while making this magazine cover is that the image was not on the internet. This meant that from the start it was hard to recreate the cover without the actual image. I found another image from the same photo shoot and improvised from it, the image I selected was similar however it was missing some parts, for example his hands.

3 strenghts of mine while recreating the magazine cover were:

• I got all of the features of from the original magazine in the correct place, this was important as it made the cover look similar has the image was different,
• I had all of the words in the correct places, and made sure that everything was spelt correctly,
• Finally, all of the text was lined up well meaning that it looked authentic.

All of these things were important while making the magazine cover as I wanted to recreate the original as well as possible, and I feel that I did the best I could.

3 weaknesses of mine while making the magazine cover were:

• I was making many mistakes at the beginning of making the magazine cover because I had never used InDesign before and was unfamiliar with a lot of the tools that I was using,
• A major weakness, was not spending enough time to find the right font. This was a lot more important than I thought that it would be; I think that if I used the perfect fonts it would of looked a lot better.
• I also think that I should’ve spent longer looking for the exact image that NME used, this would have been beneficial as it would actually look the same.

Overall I think that I did a mediocre job at recreating the magazine cover by NME. If I had searched a little bit more for the exact image that they used and the perfect font, it would’ve looked more similar. There are some positives to take from this task though, for example I learnt how to use InDesign and learnt some of the features for a magazine cover.

Below are some YouTube videos that I watched that helped me improve on InDesign.

In this task I recreated a Western tour poster, this was challenging to start with as I had to learn how to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Indesign. I used photoshop to cutout the image of Jack and then to turn it into a black and white image. I then went onto Adobe Indesign to add the text and background.

Before creating my own tour poster I decided to analyse some real Western tour posters so I knew how I would have to make mine to appeal to the desired target audience. I looked at three different posters all from different artists, from these I tried to pick up the conventions for Western tour posters. For example two of the posters included a black and white image, therefore I decided to make my cover star black and white. I then noticed that these images then had coloured backgrounds so I did the same. Once I had finished my research I went on to make a rough design of what I wanted my poster to look like. Here is a slideshow I created from doing my research:

Below is my final tour poster,

I think that I did a good job at recreating a Western Tour poster. The poster does follow some of the conventional features of a Western Tour poster, for example the cover star is wearing a cowboy hat, shirt, a bandana around his neck and holding a guitar. The majority of the posters in this genre will have a cover star using the same props, this use of mise-en-scene is very important as the audience can immediately tell the genre. I also added the flag of the United States of America to the background, after doing some research into the genre, I realised that many of the artists/fans are very patriotic. Using this knowledge, I thought it would be best to use the the USA flag in the background. All of the required information has been clearly written next to the cover star, I decided to stick to typing in the stripes of the flag, this worked very well in my opinion. Finally, I added at a redneck quote to the bottom of the page. I was inspired to do this after seeing other musicians in this genre had done so on their tour posters.

If I was to do this task again, I would spend more time trying to get the perfect font. Before doing this task I did not realise how important it was to find the right font. The right font can really help attract the correct target audience, this may not only be the font, but it could also be the colour or correct size.