To help me gain a little bit of a better understanding of my chosen genre; indie pop, I created a word cloud and found words  associated with it. Creating a brainstorm and researching different ideas has also inspired the name of my magazine ‘Vinyl’. I decided this name would be a good fit for a music magazine of this genre as viynl’s main significance is being associated with indie pop, as this type of music is most often played on it.

The reason I chose to do Indie Pop as my genre is because I have an interest in indie style music and often listen to a lot of Indie pop artists, such as Lana del rey and Billie Eilish. I feel like choosing a genre I enjoy will help me to find the research exciting as I will be studying something I personally enjoy and connect with.

My Mission statement:

‘Vinyl’ is a magazine which is designed to help new and old indie-pop fans discover some of the best indie-pop artists, it advertises for many low-key, underground artists wanting to get their name out there. It aims to encourage our readers to go to any current concerts with indie-pop music. We are a community that helps to bring everyone with the same interests together and helps people to discover their own person identity.

Reflection-

I found this task very helpful as it made me realise the importance of needing a mission statement in order to give myself and my readers a better insight of what I will be including in my music magazine. The word cloud helped me to get a good sense of my chosen genre and get to grips with the type of content I will need to include.

Focusing forward, this will help me to make a good music magazine becomes it gives me a better idea on what information I want to incorporate inside. Creating this word cloud and identifying a name for it has also helped me to discover a unique selling point, which will help me to attract my target audience.

Every magazine has a specific audience that they intend to attract when designing their front cover. It is important for designers to have a target audience that they appeal to other wise they wouldn’t be successful in attracting new customers. Usually this target audience is a certain demographic; separated by age, race or gender, however magazine producers also use subgroups within these demographics to attract people interested in a particular subject. These subgroups are divided by a persons particular interests and are psychographics. This is an effective way of advertisement because it can create a customer loyalty.

In order for producers to appeal to their target audience they use specific fonts, images, headlines and language. This can be seen in the magazine I analysed where the magazine producers have written the masthead ‘billboard’ in all lowercase and used a serif font, which is a tactical way to attract a younger audience because the name appears modern and simple, something which might not neccesarily appeal to older age groups.

Focusing forward this will help me to design my music magazine because it has helped me to think about including a certain type of demographic. For example,  I now have a better idea of  what age, gender and type of personality I intend to target. Creating this has also taught me about the importance of attracting a certain psychographic, which is similar to demographics however it is more personal and includes a persons interests, hobbies and aspirations, so I will now be able to link the technical design conventions to the interests of my desired audience.

When making a music magazine it is important to understand the rules, regulations and technical connotations. Analyzing this magazine cover has helped me to understand the importance of including all of the main design features. The key conventions I will need to include are:

• Masthead- another term for the title at the top of the page, or in this case the name of the magazine (Billboard)
• Main cover star- the main picture that covers the magazine, often a celebrity
• Coverlines- these talk about what might be inside of the magazine
• Main cover line- this is the name of the celebrity on the front cover
• Pug- a headline advertising a story inside
• Plug- similar to a coverline and used to communicate what information might be inside with words overlaid on a graphic shape or box to make them stand out

Focusing forward, learning about these conventions will help me to design the perfect front cover for my music magazine because now I know to be sure to include them. I will need to use all of these features when creating my music magazine, other wise my music magazine won’t look like a real magazine, and in order to attract an audience and be successful I need to draw attention to the cover.