Category: Music Magazine

The next stage of creating our magazine is considering how we want to represent our “star”, how they suit the genre and present themselves as a person to their audience. To better approach these ideas I looked at how this is done in real life, choosing an example of an artist in the genre I have chosen and looking at their various appearances and presentations in all aspects of the media – known as their meta narrative. This then takes into consideration the elements of  Richard Dyer’s Paradox of a Star, considering how celebrities are often represented as simultaneously extraordinary, talented and removed from society, whilst also ordinary, relatable and empathetic; all features which lead to their affection from fans and can be observed in how they are presented through the media.

From this research, I then continued to make points on and pick out common features in models of the genre, considering all elements is C.L.A.M.P.S, shown in the moodboard below with examples;

Consequently, this moodboard can act as criteria and inspiration for me to draw off of and and idea of what I aim to include and incorporate when it comes to creating my own star image / cover model.

Below is an example of and link to my pinterest board for this magazine, which I plan to be a work in progress through the development of my magazine; collecting various images, photos, fonts, layouts and general ideas for reference and inspiration in my own magazine.

To get a better idea of our target audience we were tasked with making up a dating profile for an example our target demographic. Using sites such as YouGov I looked into the general interests of people who listen to the bands of my genre, with a common audience of caucasian, white men (often millenials), who share an interest in bands such as Green Day, Blink 182, Nirvana, My Chemical Romance etc.

Creating this profile allowed me to getter a better idea and grasp of not only what the audience is interested in but what their mentality and ideaology is like, all to be considered when designing a magazine targeted towards them. Due to this I can now understand how to encode ideas, imagery and narratives that will appeal to my typical audience member and be decoded by them in preferred reading.

To begin our work directly towards the creation of our magazine we needed to form an udnerstanding of the genre and typicalities of said genre that we were going to create under. For my magazine I have decided to cover the genre of alternative/punk music, primarily due to my own experience with the genre as well as it’s clear and distinct ideologies and community. This is further reflected in the word cloud I have created, covering some of the most prominent ideas, thoughts, themes and inclusions in a magazine of this genre;

After recognising these typicalities I then needed to decide on a name for my magazine/brand, drawing from the interests of the audience and reflecting the content of the magazine whilst sounding professional, topical and memorable. After some thought I decided on the title LE, standing for the Larson Effect, a sound often created when an audio feedback loop is created, for example when an electric guitar pickup gets too clsoe to an amp or a microphone, creating a humming, electrical, often unpleasant sound. This name and idea fits the typicalities of the music as not only an effect implemented in many alternative/punk songs but as a general reflection of the distorted, heavy tones of the genre.

Finally, I had to decide on and create a mission statement;

“L.E. magazine is designed by, and for fans of alternative/punk music; providing an inside voice on all the latest reviews, releases and updates from within the genre as well as acting as an escape from the mediocrity of everyday life.”

Our next job was to analyse in more detail a professionally produced music magazine cover and audience, using data gathered from the previous exercise and linking this to how the design attracts the target demographic, through the research into their audience demographic and psychographic, how this aligns with their mission statement and how it is conveyed through the font, colours, images and language. By detailing and understanding the specific audience of a magazine you can then much better understand their perspectives and what they look for in the media the indulge in, making it easier to attract and persuade consumers to buy and read your magazine. When creating my own magazine cover I will then be able to use the skills I have learnt from this exercise to pinpoint my own target audience and attract their attention in the same ways.

In this task we were given a random magazine cover and were tasked with analysing their target audience, looking at ideas of demographics (who the audience is), psychographics (the behaviour and habits of the audience). This allowed us to get a better undertanding of how magazines successfully marketed and designed their covers to attract the attention of their target audience, important to being able to market towards them specifically and understand what media they want from a magazine, which will later be useful when decding what to feature in our own magazines.

Our first task when begining to directly work towards our music magazine was to look at and identify the conventional features of one. In pairs, we were given a random magazine cover and were instructed to label and name each typical feature used. These features include the masthead, the main title and brand of the magazine, a main cover star image (often central), a barcode and price in the bottom left hand corner and an array of smaller insets, captions and pugs to give an insight of further stories and articles inside. This analysis and identification gives us a generally better idea of the typicalities of a music magazine cover, allowing us to know to include and where when compiling our own.