Evaluation of my design for a music magazine

Authors Avatar by aisha_issaoutlookcom (student)

Evaluation of Music Magazine

Our brief was for us to design extracts for a new music magazine, which would be aimed to our target audience, young people between the ages of 16-24 that are enthusiastic about rock music and hipsters that dress in Native American clothing to express their cultural appropriation. I had to combine rock and indie, which to some extent was challenging, however, we did seek a challenging task. The extracts include; two double page spread that would be an interview or information regarding an indie rock band’s background, contents page and front cover. The pictures used in our music magazines would be original photography taken by us for the particular extracts to appeal to our target audience.

The first step, I took was researching on popular indie and rock music magazines so I could pinpoint out the common conventions. I analysed several music magazine; front covers, double page spreads and contents page and was able to see the certain features that would be appealing to my target audience. The main music magazines I had researched more in depth is the Rolling Stones, Q, NME and Kerrang! This is because the magazines focus is on indie or rock and have similar target audience to mine, which would make it easier for me to see the common conventions, which are; the masthead being easily recognisable by many readers because it’s often in bold fonts or placed in a box, cover lines, straplines, focal image, anchorage and barcodes are visual conventions. The contents page, however, had more features than the double page spread and front cover as it had; a picture and signature of the editor, sample pages and columns. I decided that I would pick a wide range of conventions in order to attract my target audience.

The masthead is RAM, which stands for Rage Against the Machines. I decided that our masthead looking similar or identical to Indie, the music magazine, because the majority of our features in the content page and front cover are having the common typical features of rock magazines that we’ve wanted to make something stand out as an indie. It’s as if this is brand to indicate to the readers that this magazine isn’t rock nor indie, its indie rock. The typography of the masthead is sans - serif because the serif front wouldn’t look appealing to the target audience that I’m focusing on attracting. Sans-serif is more suited for are particular target audience because it doesn’t have the tips and is common in indie and rock magazines.

Join now!

When accomplishing the first step, I had to start interviewing five people that fit in the same category as my target audience. This is because I wanted to gather more information on my target audience. I was able to gather a wide range of viewpoints and what they liked and disliked. For example, three out of five people liked the colour red to be in an indie rock music magazine. This may be because famous indie rock music magazines have red as the dominate colour, such as; Q and NME. The interview inspired me to include red in my magazine ...

This is a preview of the whole essay