Lesson 21 - Designing the contents page and choosing pictures

After looking at the current media today, I have used this to inspire me to design my own contents page in my own original way. I read Kerrang! magazine and have analysed the contents page of it to develop my own ideas. The magazine has one contents page and another where the editors answer emails and put in images that have been sent in by readers. I thought that I could incorporate this to my magazine and put it in one page together.

Looking at this contents page to the left in particular, I like the way how there is an image on the top half of a gig. I thought that I could make a competition of "Best gig picture of the week" so that I could add more of my own images that I have taken and place it in a way similar to what Kerrang! have done. In regards to text and colour, I thought that I would keep to dark colours to go with the front page and keep the theme of rock.

For the contents page, I thought it would be good to include an image that would relate to the rest of the magazine. For example, include something that would show what was in the magazine, such as a competition. For my contents page, I took a photo of a gig that I went to and included this at the bottom of the page. I am going to include a competition in the magazine for the subscribers and audience to participate in which would allow people to send in images to the magazine of their best gig photos and the best would win a prize. I would also include one or two images that would be shown in the rest of the magazine and on the double page spread so that the readers could see what they will read.

I am going to use the following image to show that there is a competition in the magazine:

I took many images of Amy for the double page spread as well as the front cover. I thought it would be a shame to waste the images, therefore I decided to incorporate one or two of them into the contents page.  For this following image, I didn't like the original photo; I edited the picture in order to make it look different and make it stand out from other images on the pages.

Here is the photo before I added any editing to it. The studio lights went off too early as someone else in the studio was taking images, this is why the image is brighter than usual:

I made the image darker and thought that it would look good in black and white so that the images varied in editing and style:

Despite this editing, I didn't feel that the emotion of the character that I was trying to show was as obvious in this image. I then decided to crop the photo and zoom in so that the reader would clearly see the facial expressions of Amy. 



As well as having this picture on the contents page, I thought that it would be a good idea to have a screen shot of what the double page spread looks like to make the reader want to look at the page in detail.

Lesson 20 - Designing the front cover and choosing pictures

After making these mock ups, I then went through the images that I had taken and decided on the one that I would use for the front cover.

I have decided for the front cover that I am going to use this picture. However, I think that I should edit it to make the image lighter. This is because when I used dark colours with my school magazine, it didn't print out very well and wasn't clear.

Here you can see how I have lightened the image as the flash didn't go off on the camera.



Lesson 19 - Creating mock up designs for my music magazine

First of all I decided that I should create some rough designs of where I should place certain things on my pages of the magazine. I did this so that I could follow a plan when designing and creating my work. Here are the images of what I created:

I edited the picture a bit to add light to it as it came out quite dark as the flash didnt come on.