Music Magazine Moodboard & Initial Ideas for a Music Magazine

By creating this mood board, built on different music magazine covers, I can look out for any features, colour palettes or fonts that frequently appear, or maybe how the magazine covers tend to be laid out. As I used a huger variety, I can get an idea of what genre tends to follow which designs. For example, more feminine and pop related they are, the more pink and 'bubble writing' they tend to have. Another example would be for a magazine aimed at teenagers (Say... featuring a band like All Time Low, an alternative-pop group). Magazines like that tend to use a palette of red, black and white, and use bold, sans-serif, straight/sharp edged fonts. This however can be completely contrasted by the use of ‘graffiti’ or ‘stencil’ fonts too..

Initial Idea Building
 

Genre?

The genre of music for my magazine will be of a 'rock' genre. This will include punk, alternative, post-hardcore and metal core. Overall, the genre is known for it's loud music and large audience with quite controversial opinions.

I decided to use this genre because it can be quite a loud one at times, thus giving me the opportunity to create a bold and colourful magazine cover to create the loud look.

Some examples of bands that would be typically featured within this magazine genre would be Bring Me The Horizon, Killswitch Engage, Hollywood Undead, Black Veil Brides and other related modern bands. I could also have a feature on an 'old school' or 'legendary' rock band, for example ACDC or Nirvana.

Bands?

For my band, I may ask either local band such as Splinter Group (http://blogsplinter.blogspot.com/) or members of (Ex) Warning (www.myspace.com/warningtheband) to be featured in my (fictional) magazine. Both of these groups have a rock background and genre to them, thus making them perfect for my project.

If I chose Splinter Group, it would also be really useful due to the fact I'm designing their EP album artwork for their newest EP, 'When In Rome, Eat Lions.' I could create a double page spread of how they feel towards their fans and role etc. Plus, they are all middle-aged adults so they will have a lot of musical experiences and tales to tell.

However, Warning were a band that consisted of younger, teenager members, so they would be a little easier to work with and would suit my idea of 'modern times' a little more. They went through a lot during their musical career and I could present a fictional 'reformation' page. This would be a great article to make as well because they were extremely popular in the local area and made it really far. I could talk about how they felt when things went wrong and how they would feel now. I could also put a strong focus on the fact their back... and grown up. Plus, the members look like someone you would find on a typical alternative metal magazine; long hair, dressing with a slight hint of an 'emo' fashion sense and they're all really enthusiastic to have fun and play music.

Preliminary Task; Final Piece

The PowerPoint presentations (hosted by Slideserve) below were created to show my process of creating a front cover and contents page for a school magazine.

Front Cover

The image below is the final front cover page.

Contents Page

The image below is the final contents page.

Overall, I'm quite proud of the results. I think both pieces look very nice and as if they were a real magazine. I'm also quite proud of how professional mine looks. A lot of free school magazines tend to have a very... let's say amateur look to them, whether it be they use bad colour palettes, or don't know how to use layering properly or even just creating the magazines in simple programming like MS Paint. (These tend to look very badly done...)

I do however wish I'd have taken a little more time with the photography aspect, as I feel I may have spent too much time editing the image rather than focusing on the magazines layout.

Another point I am not too proud of/wish I'd have taken into consideration during creation is that the pages do not seem to entirely 'match'. I feel the cover looks a lot more complex than the contents page. However, in my defence, a contents page isn't supposed to be jam-packed with information, it's a summary of what you are GOING to read, extremely brief. Also, the design of it may prove to make the writing a little easier to read rather than have distractions and other places to look like the front cover...

Drafts and Font Testing

I started drafting an idea for my school magazine for the Preliminary task. I tried lots of different styles and layouts to see which looked the most appealing. These are the sketches I came up with.

Using these, I then began to consider and imagine ideas for my project. I then started testing fonts and trying to see which types would look good or bad in this project;

And finally, I created a draft version of a contents page to see how I could lay things out clearly and smartly. (I must add, the photos are NOT mine. They were found on the schools servers)