Cover #1 - Rolling Stone featuring Ashton Kutcher

This cover was taken from an edition of Rolling Stone magazine published in May 2003. Although I have chosen a rather dated example to use, I thought it would add thoroughness to my research and show how covers have changed with time. Additionally, Rolling Stone is generally classed as a music magazine even though the main focus is more famous for his acting and legendary TV show 'Punk'd' but I thought I would make an exception especially for Ashton Kutcher, for fairly obvious reasons... ('eye candy', much?)

Moving swiftly on, the cover shot of Ashton Kutcher is focused mainly on the top half of his body - maybe even more so than his face - making us instantly feel welcomed and close to him intimatley making the reader feel comfortable to read the article since it now seems relaxed and informal. His body is exposed by the star lifting up his vest top in a nonchalant manner to show off (obviously) his body which will hook female readers onto it once they spot it on a shop shelf. He is already a popular male sex symbol among females of many ages which creates a larger target audience for the magazine. His picture links into the title of his feature being 'Prankster of Love' and by using this wording, it immediately connotates the image of a male shovanistic who enjoys female attention and lures them in with his looks but gives nothing in return, known these days as a 'man-slag'. Further description of his interview uses the phrase ' The Newly Single 'Punk'd Star on the Non-stop Party He Calls Life' links with his picture and suggests his life is filled with partying with girls seeing that he is now on the market and can do what he wants now that he's 'free' from the burden of being in a relationship. In another sense it can also be giving publicity my mentioning the name of his TV show which you could argue isn't essential to add to his description, it actually stands out for differing from the other choices of words which all add to his chosen image which is a typical male with alot of sex appeal to women. Therefore this again widens the audience if someone who watches his show notices the shows name on the cover which may just make them want to buy it if they are fans of Ashton Kutchers show.
Still focusing on the picture but now incorporating the colour scheme with it, you can see his vest top matches the background colour and logo colour - maybe just by fluke or for a reason. On the other hand maybe his vest colour was picked purposefully to link him more to the magazine, suggesting again closeness and acceptance.
The background of the photo of Ashton Kutcher is blurry but I think its an outdoor setting with trees but mostly sky. The outdoors has a classic association with someone who is energetic and enjoys being outside, someone who maybe enjoys keeping fit, playing sports or just enjoying nature. The more obvious reason is that Ashton Kutcher likes to keep fit and get out and about staying busy - linking back to the quote of 'Non-Stop Party He Calls Life' proposes the idea hes never indoors and always busy doing something - which is usually partying. The 'keeping fit' aspect is highlighted more as he is showing off a toned and muscular body in the picture which creates another link with the reasons for the setting he is in.

Other aspects that feature on the cover are descriptions of the main articles in the magazine. These include the small box near the title in the top right of the page. It stands out on the page by the box itself being a stand off bright white against the dull blue background with a thick black border. Apart from the visual devices, it also uses highly influencing words 'EXCLUSIVE HIS FIRST INTERVIEW IN TEN YEARS' anyone who see's this will immediately think 'wow, ten years, I must read this!' this gives the magazine a huge advantage for the fans of Eddie Vedder as this is the only magazine hes featured in for such a long time and they will want to find out ASAP whats been happening for the last ten years, why he's been hidden away for so long and why he's decided to return after all that time.

Underneath that, a feature titled 'ALL GIRL SMACKDOWN - INSIDE THE WORLD OF PRO CAT FIGHTING' this is a device used to now attract male readers rather than female as was shown before with the graphic. This time it uses the image of girls fighting in a 'smackdown' which gives the impression of girls having a scrap against eachother as a competition which wil no doubt provoke male reception.

The last main feature I will focus on is the 'VOODOO ECONOMICS How Bush Is Looting America'. This now jumps from talking about celebrity gossip and music to something political that is linked to society and therefore is aiming at a more sophisticated and mature audience who take an interest in polotics and whats going on in the world - the more serious stuff. It just so happens this has been put next to what appears to be a bandanna sticking out of Ashton Kutchers pocket on the photo which has an American flag print on it. This is being used as a semiotic to link Ashton Kutcher to America maybe suggesting he takes a patriotic approach towards his country and likes to get involved in the know-how, contradicting his previously quoted 'Non Stop Party He Calls Life'.

Overall, I think a fair amount of thought went into arranging this cover to make links between the graphic aspects such as the matching top with the background and joining political stories with it too. It is similar to the idea I will make in my final design for my own magazine cover and has given me more knowledge of not only how, but why magazines use presentational devices to lure in their target readers. They try to reach the demographic by having each headline or visual tactic to coax as many people as possibly to pick up the magazine and spend their hard earned money on it.

My Genre - Why?

In preparation of beginning the task in hand of designing my own magazine, I thought a clever action to take would be to delve into researching the techniques that magazines of each genre of music use to appeal to their target audience.

It has became apparent to me as I started thinking over some magazine names and their intended genre that rock dominates at the moment. There's also a great list of magazines available to us nowadays more than ever, maybe because bands are finding it easy to make it big with new big influences of media such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo where bands can upload their tracks and create virtual online fan bases without ever having to be played on the radio therefore not even accepted by today's culture. This can lead to bands eventually being brought into the mainstream of the music industry just by a website. Maybe this is the reason the amount of music magazines is increasing, music lovers want to know about the fresh and new non-mainstream bands that are out there on the world wide web but need some slight guidance of which artists are just wannabe trash and which artists could be the next big thing.

After Googling magazines of the main genres of rock, pop and dance, the world of teen magazines took me back to when I read them, and made me realize they contain total drivel because they know their audience are gullible pre-teens who believe anything that they read will make them 'normal' to fit in with school friends and other girls their age. I think I'll pass on including any element of this in my magazine creation. Shortly after, I decided to take out my iPod and look through the genres. Weirdly enough I came across 'rave' and I thought "hmm, this could be interesting". Also, I knew from watching other peoples proposals they were either doing rock, pop or R&B so I thought I'd venture from the sheep and focus on something totally different like a bright and colourful rave magazine, which I do know a fair bit about from hearing about it and seeing it in the media. It's incorporated with fashion too, now that more and more people are joining the scene and wanting places that specialise in the apparel and accessories.
I noticed there wasn't much more choice out there for people with any other taste than rock so I thought I'd help them out and move on from the cliche.

It is now clear to me that rock is dominating the media. Not just music magazines or on the radio, but in the fashion industry too. Since more rock bands are about we see how they dress, then celebrities dress as they do, who we then see snap shots of in glossy magazines then before we know it the fashionistas are making clothes for the high street that they know we'll want so we can look like those celebrities we so dearly look up to for image guidance. Before long its taking over and now if you don't wear clothes influenced by rock, you aren't part of the norm. You aren't hip. You're not trendy. It's a vicious cycle which has kicked off and its becoming hard to put and end to. It's clear rock is thriving at this period in time.

On delving into further investigation, I considered maybe taking ideas from my research to stand out from the norm, to do something different and give recignition to the rave scene and prove its not just about weirdos that wear tye-dye, take pills and fling themselves around in a club. On looking at examples of not only magazine covers, but online websites for fans of the music, I knew I'd have to research alot more to grasp the less obvious the key features that I'll need to include to make my magazine conventional. But for know, I just know to keep it colourful and quirky.

My final decision has been made, I will begin to research magazines influenced by rave and techno, as vague and mysterious this genre may be to me. I intend analyze it to widen my research and maybe discover some of the more effective presentational devices they include despite the fact it's not exactly the kind of music I have a liking for. Despite this, I will make sure to make the conventional expectation of a magazine, perfect for a raver.

Main Music Magazine - First Things First..

On beginning the main task, I must initially formulate a basic plan of how I will carry out the whole of the task step by step. These steps will be as follows:

• Research existing magazine covers
• Research my target audience
• First rough draft of my cover, contents and double page spread
• Plan a photo shoot
• Final article creations

However, before i can begin any step the entire project, I must select a genre for my magazine. I will chose a genre that I regularly purchase and read and obviously take an interest in. As a result, this will give me an advantage on knowing the aspects of what my design should consist of, how it should be laid out and the formatting of the presentational devices.

Final draft for school magazine cover and contents page

Magazine cover and contents drafts

Research and Planning

Before I could start anything on the preliminary task I decided I'd carry out some research first into magazine designs from other schools, colleges or universities from around the world. Taking examples from other countries such as America or Australia could help to widen my research and give me a better understanding of how different techniques are used in different ways to suit a certain audience.
I used the search engine Google to begin looking for other school magazines as it's probably the easiest and quickest way to find a wide variety of covers from anywhere in the world. I used the image search first just searching for 'school magazine' and clicked on one from a school called St. Louises Comprehensive College in Belfast.
Their cover is as follows;

Upon first looking at it, it is clearly a very basic design. It has a plain main colour with a simple layout and not much imagination has gone into the creation of it. It has dreary colours and fonts that dont really tell you much about the school from a glance. It appears that it comes across as quite a bland and boring school and wouldn't be an exaple of what I would put onto my school front cover. The only possible thing I could consider using is the way the colour scheme works together and the writing clearly stands out from the background.
I continued searching and decided to find an example from outside of the UK and looked at Harvard Univeristy's magazine as it's a high up and well known university.

You can tell immediately that their magazine is extremely professional. They use a high quality image, edited well and photographed well, and probably taken by a student that attends the univeristy. The font colour for the title matches the colour of the lizard but still stands out from the background. The font also connotates the feeling of sophistication and high class - which is what Harvard is renound for. This is a skill id like to apply to my school magazine to make it look as real as possible and not just something anybody could make on Microsoft Publisher.
My third and final example was taken from an Australian university magazine which is the Univeristy of Melbourne.

This magazine also looks very professional as the Harvard one did, but differs in many ways. This cover uses a much less colourful main picture as its black and white, but compensates for it by putting a colourful banner underneath the magazine title and subheadings. Its title cleverly highlights the letters 'our' in 'Melbourne' which makes it sound like everybodies included in the making of the magazine. They have also created a logo for the university which is used next to the title but isn't very prominant.
Overall these covers have given me some good ideas of what i should put onto my school from cover but i probably won't make one upto the sophisticated standard of the major universities.


Now that I have looked into the conventions of other magazines I can begin planning my own.
Firstly, the most important feature of it would probably be the name. I went through a few ideas but ended up chosing the simplest one of them all "Monkey News" knowing many of the younger less mentally privileged students we have wouldn't question the contents of the magazine and they would clearly realise that the word 'Monkey' being short for Monkseaton and the word 'News' obviously is there because the magazine will be filled with breaking news about the school.
As for the story lines I decided to definitely include something about the brand new school that is currently being built and mention something about its progress on the front cover. Also I would put in a headline to go with my main picture I had already taken which was a slightly mug shot looking photo of a male student at the school. I thought I'd probably put some high profile scandal story to get readers attracted as theres nothing people love more than a juicy bit of gossip about someone they may know as a friend, acquaintance or student. I thought another good idea for a story would be something to do with the head teacher Dr. Kelley as everyone is familiar with him and yet again would be interested in a story involving him.

After gathering some ideas for the story lines I decided I needed to chose the colour scheme but I thought rather than just include my own opinion and ideas I wanted to make a questionnaire asking other peoples preferences about the colour scheme, story lines and the layout of the magazine.

Preliminary Task Outline

Missing the first few weeks of this course I can't carry out this task in as much detail as others, so I will just research in order to make a cover and leave out the contents page. So before I could even start any work on the main music magazine task, I began my first task of creating a cover for a school magazine. It needed to be constructed using image editing programmes and it had to feature a photograph of an actual student as the main focus and texts that would appeal to the audience.
I established a list of tasks consisting of the stages I should follow;

1. Research into existing covers
2. Planning the cover
3. Rough drafts
4. Audience
5. Final draft
6. Take photograph
8. Edit image and put into final design