Category: Music Magazine

So What Am I Up Against – The Competition?

In order to fully understand the competition present within the genre of my magazine, Indie Pop. I created a piktochart to highlight the various conventions of an indie magazine and give me an idea of what to include in mine when I come to producing it.

Focus Forward

Whilst creating my piktochart, it allowed me to understand the key conventions featured on an Indie magazine and give me an insight into what is effective and works well for the genre. For future projects, I will ensure that I have used all the key characteristics of an Indie Pop magazine so that it is successful in attracting the target audience.

Branding Ideas

To start communicating some ideas for my Magazine, I created a word cloud filled with words and artists relating to my chosen genre, Indie Pop.

After completing the word cloud, I decided to give my magazine a name that reflected the Indie pop genre and its values – I chose ‘Cloud Nine’.

Mission Statement

Cloud Nine offers a unique experience within the wider community, for those young aspirational individuals considering a potential career in the music industry. We strive to empower and motivate newly emerging artists and provide them with special opportunities that boost their confidence with their imagination, creativity, and originality. We are passionate about bringing ingenuity with our content to reflect our dedication to inspiring small artists, collaboration to drive the community feel of the readership, and allowing them to express their true selves artistically.

A Front Cover Analysed – Attracting ‘that’ Audience

Reflection

Linking back to Blumler&Katz, you need to be aware of the audience’s uses and gratifications. As a designer, it is important to understand that you are designing for an audience and not yourself. It is useful to identify your audience’s Demographics and Psychographics in order for your magazine to be successful. Demographics use concrete variables such as age, gender, and class to help categorize an audience. Whereas Psychographics are based on an audiences interests, attitudes, and opinions.

When designing my magazine, I will take into consideration certain aspects of a visually appealing front cover in order to satisfy my target audience.  I’ll have a clear plan on my audience segmentation which then will aid me further to recognize what language, images, colour palette and fonts I’d require to make my magazine attract my target audience.

Conventional Design Features of a Magazine

Here is our annotated Magazine Cover with all the features labelled:

Reflection

A magazine cover usually consists of a:

• Masthead – Gives the title/name of a publication.
• Main Cover Line – Headline advertising the main story or feature inside the magazine.
• Main Cover Star – Large picture of the main feature.
• Cover lines – Short phrases designed to attract attention/motivate people to read the other articles within the magazine.
• Captions – Little headlines under a picture.
• Pugs – Small sticker used to promote/advertise.
• Plugs – Selling points of a magazine.
• Insets – A small picture inserted on the front cover of a magazine.
• Issue/Date – Lets you know the date of when it was launched.
• Price – Provides the price of the item.
• Barcode – Enables you to scan it.

After analysing the front cover of this magazine, it has helped me identify the purposes for each technical and formal convention. Additionally when I come to produce my own magazine, I know what I need to include and create in order to reach my audience expectations.