For this part of the preliminary task we were instructed to create our own magazine cover based primarily on our school: Lutterworth College, with a secondary genre of music, meaning our magazine had to combine our school and a type of music. and we had to complete this magazine cover within a week. In this instance I chose to research music magazines to discover which type of music is written about the most and which particular music magazine is read the most by the public and to ultimately gain inspiration and to help me decide which type of music was best to aim my magazine at. In the end my research showed that the music genre Rock is written about the most and attracts the most music lovers, I also discovered that Kerrang was the most read rock magazine. So with this learnt I choose Rock as my music genre. Also further research into rock magazines showed that the colour schemes are simple and based largely on 3 colours (ignoring black for the lettering), these 3 colours would consist of one primary colour used in the majority of the cover and 2 other colours which are either used for colour fills or lettering. I also noticed that the majority of Rock magazines had lots of pictures, boxes and lettering that were all trying to gain attention which I found off putting, so to create a more professional front cover I've decided to use only a few eye grabbing techniques giving the readers time to understand the whole front cover.
Firstly me and my partner Beau created a plan based on all the research we had conducted in which we included ideas for magazine names, slogans, strap lines, pictures and the main profile picture. With this rough plan we then decided on the name for our magazine which is: School of rock, we then discussed which types of pictures would be best for the cover and who we should use for the profile shot. We then finally decided to use a friend Ross for the profile picture because of his resemblance to the Rock genre and used his team mate Ollie for another shot to use for one of our cover stories. With some quick improvising me and Beau decided to also use Fred Flint for another cover story because of his resemblance to a Bouncer and because of one of our cover stories based on an unfortunate event with a rock star.
After taking our pictures Me and my partner Beau set out to try and replicate our plan on photoshop elements, we first imported the images and layered them out as we had drawn and started to discuss the best places to put the smaller pictures and their cover stories. We then finally cropped the main profile image of Ross and placed him slighted to left so that we could place the other two images to his right so the main picture wasn't obstructed in any way, we also decided upon this because the reader will read from left to right and after reading our magazine name will start to read about Ross and his story. I then started to draw out some designs and write down some ideas for our magazine logo and decided to go for a skribbled on paper look which is very reminiscent of school and also gives off a rebellious feel similar to that of Rock. To put these ideas into a logo I searched a website called Dafont.com to find the font closest to our designs, after searching their school section of fonts I found the most ideal one, typed out the logo on paint and then saved it as a JPEG picture to use in photoshop. I used the same font for our logo: Rock First, Education Last.
Thanks to our previous research me and Beau understood that our magazine had to have a consistent colour scheme, after looking at our main profile picture we noticed that Ross was wearing predominant colours of blue, and that in our other pictures blue walls and doors were positioned behind the person being photographed. This gave use the perfect main colour to use for our cover. We then started to write out our various stories and incorporate the colour scheme into the texts, for instance all cover stories and the logo were in blue, the strap line was in white and the colour fill was in black. We overall believed this to be a perfect colour scheme for our magazine because of the white and black contrasting each other and because they are used commonly in other rock magazines and the dark blue was very representative of the indie/emo rock genre which was involved strongly in the main cover story.
Overall I think our final magazine cover is very effective in combining Lutterworth college and Rock and is very appealing to our target because of the colour scheme, pictures and stories that bring the hyped Rock persona crashing into the dullard stereotype of modern schooling.
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