What Next?

Now I have finished my Preliminary Exercise I will now move on to doing planning for my actual music magazine cover.

I have had lots of ideas from books, other magazines and the internet to help me decide on exactly what look I wanted to go for. 

I originally wanted to do high end fashion which didn't work out as it had to relate to music. So, I came to the conclusion that I could still incorporate all of the fashion but just into music as well/ I though of this as the musicians I will be focussing on, even though their image doesn't tend to look as if they have spent long getting it, when it has really taken them hours and many stylists to get there!!

The ruffled hair, baggy clothes, just got out of bed look is the exact look I will be going for and I will be showing this all through my planning stages.

I have recently been working on another mood board which I will up load soon but I will give an idea of what will be on it.

There is a sketch of a GQ front cover which I have copied and then posted the original next to it so you can see the style which I have copied. I have then taken photos of myself  in the same position as the model on the front of the magazine and then tried to replicate the cover just like the one of GQ. it has worked really well as even though they look so similar in many ways they still look completely different and have a completely different style to one another.

As well as a replica front cover I have also copied a contents page and a double page spread to get the idea of what it is like to have a house style and why GQ have chosen that particular one.

Why does it work so well?

Why is it so popular?

Once I have uploaded a image of the mood board I will give feedback on what I think will work for my magazine and what I don't think will work so well. I think  this has been a major help in actually getting ideas from my head onto a page seeing as there are so many to think of at once. With  magazine the possibilities are endless!! You can basically do anything you like as long as you think it will work. 

Below are the pictures I took which are in a similar pose to the ones of the GQ magazine. (There is also the cover so you can see the contrast and similarities in the pose.) I have also uploaded the finished version of my magazine cover to show how I developed it. I found it a lot easer to do this cover on Photoshop because I had got use to the program. I didn't do every detail of the magazine the same because I figured it would take a long time and I could use the time it would take in a more effective way.)

Preliminary Contents page

After completing the preliminary front cover I then moved on to the contents page which is above.

I again, found this easier to do as I had even more experience of using photoshop and had began to find my way around photoshop quite well.

One of things I noticed and Mr B told me about was that contents pages which have pictures on never have 2 pictures with the same page number. I was confused at first as to why but then I realised it was because magazines pay so much money per page of a magazine that they would want to use it in the most productive way possible.

So, therefore, the magazine would put as many different picture from different events of the contents as possible, so basically not 2 pictures from the same, event, article, issue.

I enjoyed doing the preliminary exercise as it gave me a chance to be using photoshop in more depth and focus on one activity for a few weeks. (This is why I hadn't done much on my blog for the past few weeks up until now!!)

I'm now moving on to completing plans for my main cover, the music magazine. I will sketch ideas for what I want the cover to look like. These will then be scanned into my blog and I will add comments.

preliminary front cover

This is the final for my preliminary exercise.

I started by choosing the background colour and then worked my way round everything else like editing the actual picture.
I chose the text because it is bold and attracts the eyes straight the cover which I wanted because it then shows the reader exactly what the magazine will be about straight away.

I think the picture has developed so much from the original and looks a lot more attractive with so much going on which makes the reader want to pic up the magazine. The small captions dotted around the page such as 'first interviews' and 'special edition' also make the reader want to pick the magazine up and see what else it has to say about the main issue/article in the magazines content.

I like the way the picture is quite central and the text compliments this with its boldness and main title which eyes are immediately dawn to.

The part I found difficult was managing all of the layers and finding ways of putting text over certain images and backgrounds, but apart from that I have really learnt a lot from doing the 'practice' front cover earlier on in the blog. The Rolling Stone Cover which was my first attempt at a cover, I found much more difficult to produce as I had to previous experience and it definitely looks a lot less professional and advanced than the preliminary cover.