Here I have created a slide of the conventional key features of Punk Rock tour posters in order to understand how I might make one of my own. I compared the images of the posters I found on the internet to each other and found that they all used very similar fonts, images and writing size in order to capture the eye of the intended audience. This exercise was useful because I now know how to effectively lay my ideas out and analyse the typical conventions of a different music genres before I begin to design my magazine in a unique way, but with these ideas in mind.

Next I used InDesign and Photoshop to create my own original tour poster using an image of a model I took from a previous photo shoot as the main cover star. I used Photoshop to cut the model from the background and add special effects to the image in order to attract my target audience and then I used InDesign to add writing to the cover. In order to effectively capture the attention of my Punk Rock fan base I used my slideshow to keep in mind the key features needed on the cover.

Please click on the poster to see a PDF.

Please click on the image to see a PDF.

Please click on the image to see a clearer pdf.

Below is a tutorial for how to use Indesign I watched in order to help me create my magazine cover.

This is the original magazine cover by NME.

In this task we learnt how to use Indesign to create magazine covers. This exercise has helped me as I am now able to make my own, original music magazine cover.

• I have learnt that using different fonts, colours and sizes in my writing helps to make an eye-catching magazine cover, as well as adding weight and changing the letter spacing.
• It has helped me to understand the technical conventions of a magazine cover, for example I learnt how to locate the masthead and pugs.
• I think that my magazine cover was somewhat accurate in copying the original cover because I managed to replicate the fonts of the writing as well as add the correct weight to the masthead, however the image of the main cover star was different to the original one and so made a more obvious difference in appearance overall.

Although I couldn’t use the exact same same image as the one used by NME, I do think I adapted my writing effectively in order to try and replicate the original cover an make the words clear for the audience to see, for example I changed the colours of the quote to black as this made the writing more easy to read.

This week in Media studies we were learning about how to use Cameras to help us with our work. We have learnt how to tell different stories in pictures by using our camera in different ways such as changing the angle, framing, and distance. For example, we learnt that close up pictures can be used to capture emotions of characters, while long shot images could portray the loneliness of a character or give an insight to their surroundings. In our photo shoot we portrayed a variety of emotions with different models but in some cases it was hard to capture the emotions when we didn’t use the right settings on our camera. For example, in one photo of a close up of our model in a dark corridor, there wasn’t enough light exposure for the image to be clear enough to see what was going on. We also had to experiment with the focusing settings on the camera as we found that a lot of our pictures were coming out blurry. Therefore, we had to increase the aperture as it would allow more light into the image. We learnt that in order to display different emotions we had to change the framing and angles of pictures so that they could effectively portray different narratives.

Through a method of trial and error with adjusting the settings such  as shutter speed and aperture, we managed to take some images that were effective in portraying different narratives and emotions. This exercise was useful because it will allow me to be able to take good quality photos for my music magazine as I  now know some of the key features of a camera.