Week 14/15 BLOG

For help when making my magazine contents page I bought a Vibe magazine for inspirations and for me to develop my ideas from this source. I focussed on the layout and positioning, the colour, the images and the purpose. When looking through my magazine I noticed that there was a theme going on with the colours, the colours matched the colours that were on the front cover such as the sub headings and text. With vibe magazine I also noticed that some particular contents pages were a bit different from other contents pages that I researched such as the lay out for example the magazine I looked at had the writing on one side (on the left) and the image as the background. When analysing the text, I noticed that Vibe had created a unique barcode and placed it not only on the contents page but also on every page which I thought was a clever thing to do, it makes the readers recognise the vibe symbol barcode which is a great distinctive advertisement. Another thing that jumped out to me was the small print at the bottom of the contents page. It basically said who was on the front cover, the photographer, stylist, makeup artist and where the shot was taken. I will develop and challenge this technique so that my magazines can test real magazines. When I7 read some of the events on the contents page in Vibe the ideology that I received is that they try to draw you in with certain texts but at the same time they don’t want to give too much information about that topic so they use teasers so the audience can look on that certain page.

When creating my contents page I must design it according to my particular social groups. Due to the fact that my genre is r n b, my pictures will relate to the theme and fit into the conventions of real media products.  I thought about the pictures that I wanted to use very carefully so I chose to take pictures of people who I felt best described r n b. I took pictures of the artists who I mentioned on the front cover to remind the audience which artists were in the magazine.

I would say I am attracting and addressing my audience by the use of eye catching colours, creative images, interesting language and presentation. I will use Berger, J 1977 theory of the ways of seeing, men look, women appear, women watch themselves being looked at. I will add females and males to balance the sex of the magazine so it is not completely one sided.

Looking back at my preliminary task of my contents page it has helped me to develop and understand where I went wrong and has given me some ideas on to how to improve it, for instance I realised that on my contents page for my preliminary task I never added enough pictures and the layout looked like a book instead of a school magazine.  I have achieved this by changing the lay out and format within the contents page. 

This is a print screen of my magazine in Adobe Indesign. I organised all my layers on the right hand side to make it easier for me to work with.  I tried to make the yellow/orangey font colour the same as my front cover. I used red because of the colour of Goldie’s shirt who is the main artist. When analysing one of Vibe’s contents page there was only one image, but because we have to use more than one image I had to re think of my design without making it look like a contents page from a book.

Here are a few contents pages that I have looked at for inspiration when making my magazine. As you can the one on the left is more like my layout of my magazine.