My Proposal (long)

My Proposal

For this project, we have been asked to create our own music magazine. In which we will create from scratch a front cover, contents page and a double page spread which will fit to my chosen genre. At the start of this task I set my own target which I would like to achieve which is to ‘make my magazine look as professional as possible.

To start off, I needed to choose what type of genre I wanted my magazine to be based on. So to help me decided a genre, I started by researching different types of music genres. There was a wide verity too chose form but I selected three in which I needed to choose form, which were Rock, POP and R&B. I wanted to pick one in which I knew a lot about, so because of that reason I chose the genre ‘POP’.  Next I moved on to researching target audience, and for the majority of ‘POP’ magazines the target audience are young teen girls. This I because a lot of recent ‘POP’ music is created by young teen boys, for example ‘Justin Beiber’ and ‘One Direction’. So because of this research, I have decided to use ‘teen girls’ as my target audience.

Now I had my Initial ideas for what I was going to create, I started to do some more research on what codes and conventions ‘pop’ magazines include.  By doing this research, it helped me know what key codes and conventions to include in my magazine. This will help my magazine look more professional and realistic. Some key conventions which I found out every magazine use include:

·         Mast head (This is the name of the magazine, which is located at the top left of every magazine. This is so that when they are stacked on the magazine shelves in the shop, each magazine name can be seen for the customers to see.) 

·         Price (The price of the magazine will be located in large font IF the price is cheap, if not it will usually be found close to the bar code)

·         Bar code (this is on the cover of every magazine, so it can be scanned when you’re buying it.)

·         Main image (This is the main picture on the front cover, which will usually be an image of a celebrity.)

·         Main Cover line (This will be in large font on the page, because it is the main story inside. It will usually be biased on the main image.)

The next task was to look at examples of ‘contents pages’ and ‘double page spreads’ and see what layout and key information they include. To help me understand what I needed to include in my work, I did a written analysis of a front cover, contents page and a double page spread.  This helped me understand what codes and conventions I need to include for mine. Another research task which I did, was researching about other magazine production companies.  I researched ‘Distributers and publishers’ and looked at audience expectations. I next looked at what my house style would be like, so I did some researched on pop magazines and the majority of girl pop magazines use ‘girly’ colours like pink and purple. They also don’t include loads of text, so normally they only include three of four columns.  I then had loads of ideas of what my magazine would look like, so next I created a mood board of my ideas. On this I included different colours, font sizes, font colours and pictures.          

I then created the name of my ‘publishing company’ which I called ‘Pink Publishing’s’. I have done this because I think it relates to my target audience. My target audience is teen girls, and everyone knows that pink is a girly colour. I have also created a logo for my company which is this picture of a heart with ‘PP’ in the middle. This obviously means ‘Pink Publishing’s’. I wanted my logo to be simple so that it is easily recognisable, like some big company logos like ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’.

To make my final ideas clear, I have made some spider diagrams to display my ideas so I can go through them step by step when in the creating process. Before starting my magazine I’m going to create draft layout for my front cover so I have a brief idea how I’m going to layout my front cover. Then I’m going to write a draft story for my double page spread so that I can plan and improve my ideas if needed. I will also need to plan my images which will be on the cover and inside such as what camera angles, lighting and who is actually going to be in the image.

When creating the pages I will use ‘Photo Shop’. So before starting this project I practiced using the program so that I could get used to the tools and get some editing practice. I will make sure that I make my pages plain and not too complicated.