Using the mood board for my star image, I have thought about each element of mise-en-scene. I have tried to keep to the conventions of the genre, but also added other elements into my representation to make my cover stand out. Based on my ideas, when I am shooting, I will adjust the other elements of media language, acting, lighting to make the best overall composition.
This is a dating profile for a typical reader of my magazine. It includes their interests and what type of life that they are looking for. It shows what they enjoy doing and what they want for the future.
When creating a piece of media it is essential to understand who you are making it for, this is called your target audience. This target audience is typically found through surveys based on different demographics, such as age or gender. To help me better understand this audience, I created a dating profile for who I think my target audience is.
I will need to consider Blumler and Katz’s uses and gratification theory. This is the theory that quality media should have 4 needs of the consumer, entertainment, information, social interaction and personal identity. For example, for information, I could create a column on new and upcoming songs and artists in the Hip-Hop genre.
These are some surveys on Hip Hop fans and who they are
I think that the Masthead is one of the most important features of a magazine as These are some of the masthead that I designed in InDesign. They use different fonts and sizes. I knew that I wanted my Masthead to be black as I didn’t want too many colours on my front cover so I decided to keep the colours neutral. For my final font I have picked the top one. I feel this is a conventional yet effective font as well as bold and not too distracting. It is large and eye-catching but not too much. When looking to make my magazine, this task has helped me to decide upon conventional elements for my magazine.
I liked the look of most of these front pages of Hip Hop magazines purely because there was not loads of text taking over and the image was very much the main attraction. Also, without lots of other text I think it makes the front cover looks a lot cleaner and more appealing in my opinion. Covers such as the XXL covers consist of lots of information of what is inside the magazine which is useful, yet I think it makes the cover look cluttered and hectic. Whereas ones such as L’aumo have not so much text or make the text not as big and blends in more with the theme of the magazine and it does not make the cover look as hectic as some of the others. I also very much liked the L’aumo magazine cover as the colours complimented each other well along with the Respect magazine cover. One of the magazines, Nataal, is unconventional as it has no information as to what is inside the magazines. However, I think this works as it makes the cover look a lot cleaner in my opinion and is very appealing. This will be essential in my magazine cover as I want to make it as appealing as possible. Along with that there are many other conventions that I will want to incorperate in my magazine such as the sans-serif mastheads.
This slideshow is an example of some of the repertoire of elements that I will need to think about when creating my Hip Hop magazine. Biggie Smalls is one of the biggest Hip Hop artists of all time. I am attempting to mimic his fashion and style in my magazine as I feel that it best represents the style of Hip Hop. The second slide portrays some of the other top Hip Hop artists and their style. As you can see they wear lots of baggy, oversized clothes and lots of large jewellery, which I will make sure to include in my magazine. This star image displays a ordinary and attainable way of life which makes the artist relatable to their audience, yet while still having an element of power to them.
When creating my Hip Hop magazine I will need to consider all of these aspects to what makes a good magazine. All features such as who to include and what is included in a typical Hip Hop magazine. While at the same time I will need to make mine slightly different to attract audience. The audience will want something different from a typical magazine while still containing repertoire of elements that are necessary such as information on recent songs and interviews with popular artists. My USP is going to be creating a platform in which the community and audience will be able to air their ideas and thoughts on the latest news and releases.
Double H is going to be the name of my magazine as my magazine is going to be based on the genre of Hip Hop. I have chosen this name as it is short and a play on the words Hip Hop which will make it memorable when people hear or see it. This is a word cloud of lots of words associated with the genre of Hip Hop and I think represent what I want to create quite well. My mission statement is ‘ We want to keep people in the Hip world up to date with all things Hip Hop. People fall in love with Hip-Hop and it is our job that they are fully invested in everything Hip-Hop’. This represents the brand well, what it stands for and goals of the brand. The uses and gratification theory contains 4 things that contribute to creating a good magazine. Entertainment – My magazine will be entertaining as it will be pleasing to the eye which creates a vocal point for readers to talk about. Information – The front cover will be full of information of the latest news involving Hip Hop. Personal Identity – The cover star will be wearing clothes that are fashionable which readers can talk about and buy them to reinforce their personal identity. Social Interaction – On my magazine there will be information of a website in which readers can discuss the magazine and express their thoughts.
5 key descriptors to my magazine are
This mood board consists of a number of Punk tour posters which I used as inspiration for my tour poster. A common thing I noticed that all of the posters used was the use of abstract images. The images/illustrations seem to be mostly animals and creatures. The fonts are all quite unique compared to one another but are quite wild and ‘out of control’. All of these conventions that are featured in many tour posters of my genre will be helpful when creating mine.
This is my image that I created from scratch. My goal was to re create the magazine cover from below as accurately as possible. I think I did quite well apart from the red text which I struggled to recreate to the same exact colour. Apart from that I got on quite well with Adobe InDesign. I think I did quite a good job recreating the text and using almost identical fonts. For example the text in the bottom right was more a less identical to the original. Another thing that I’m not very happy is the background image quality. There was no other image on the internet that was better quality so I had to choose this one which is quite blurry. Overall I think that I did quite a good job recreating the original apart from some minor details.
In the future when I am designing my own magazine cover I will ensure that the background image is of better quality and I will also make sure that the text that should be the same colour isn’t slightly different. I also need to make sure that the background
This video will help me in the future when using InDesign to create more advanced projects.
This video will also be useful when using InDesign in the future when I come to making my own magazine. I can use this video for inspiration depending on what genre I choose.
It is very important to understand the key components of a magazine cover as they are a huge part of whether the magazine is a success or not. All the different components adds to whether the magazine reaches the target audience. We annotated these using our knowledge of the conventions to pick out the key parts such as the masthead, cover lines, main cover line etc.
This knowledge will be beneficial when I make my magazine cover as I will need to know what conventions to follow. I will follow these to make sure my magazine cover looks similar to other magazine covers and will therefore be easily recognized by potential customers.