Feedback

James - you appear to have done nothing much since last feedback post and there is still a lot of planning tasks not evidenced here. You need to get these done for when we get back to college, including getting your mock-ups scanned and added. You also need to have written your article and to have taken your photos by the time we get back.

Feedback

You have worked well on this over the last week to catch up and now have covered all the tasks for research to some extent. Some of them need a bit of development to make them really strong - use my comments and work on these over Christmas if you can't get to them before.

You have started on the planning tasks and now need to work hard to get these up to date, so you can get going on the production of your pages.

Can you try to use the label box at the bottom of each post to assign the post to a category e.g. research, planning, production...?

Also could you talk to me about the contents page post early on in your blog - is it part of your prelim?

Equipment/Technologies to be used

I am going to use the camera to take the pictures for the magazine. When taking the pictures i may have to use artificial lighting to make the picture look better and clearer. The musical instruments such as the guitar will be used in the pictures. The pitures that I take will have to be transferred to the computer and then I might use photoshop for a couple of the images and then to develop my magazine I would use indesign.  

Target audience

Here is a questionnaire with the results that that I set to find out what the typical person in the indie genre is like and how popular it is.

Which type of music do you tend to like the most out of these below?

Pop-8

Indie-6

Rock-4

Hip Hop-2

How often do you tend to buy a CD or download music?

Regularly-11

Often-7

Not very often-2

Hardly at all-0

Do you often buy music magazines?

Yes-8

No-12

If yes how often?

Weekly-5

Every two weeks-0

Monthly-3

Are you more interested in new bands/artists rather than established ones?

Yes-4

No-8

Have equal interest in both-8

From these results I found that the typical person is of a young age and tends to buy music magazines. They also are interested in the up and coming bands which is good for my magazine because it is what it is based on. From this knowledge I now have an idea of who my target audience is and will be easier to know what kind of content I should be putting in, such as the text and whether it should have slang in it or not.

Journalistic style

The journalistic style of these types of magazines is that they ussually use good english but then use a lot of slang as well. They tend to use slang in interviews because  depending on who they are interviewing they may use a lot of slang but some of them use quite a lot of good english. In the magazine context itself it will use a blend of good english and slang. They use good english because the magazine needs to have structure and needs to make sense. They tend to use slang becasue the audience in this genre tends to be of the younger generation so using slang the audience can relate to it more easily and may prefer it with slang in.

Also they often use images or large text, often quotes that have been picked out, to break up the text as shown in this article above. They also use the drop down letter quite a lot which this article has also used.

Name and Fonts

The name that I may use for the magazine is Indie Express. This name suits the indie genre which I am basing my magazine on and is quite catchy. Other potential names were NIM(new indie music), Music Mag and Indie On Demand.
I have seen a few possible fonts to use in my magazine. These are Phat Grunge Bold,Hard Rock, Docteur Atomic and Oreos. these are fonts that I think may work well with my magazine but out of all of them the one that is most effective is Phat Grunge Bold. I also had to decide on the colours that I wanted to use in the magazine. A colour combination that worked well with the title is blue and black which suited the font and would probably suit the magazine more than the other colours.

Annotated magazine front cover, double page article and contents page

Media Annotations of Magazine

Indie Genre Research

Poster and Album Art Analysis

Research Feedback

James, you have completed some of the research tasks and the prelim but there is still quite a bit for you to work on  to get this up to date. On the whole you have some clear basic research but need to make your work more visual and you also want to proof-read some of these posts a little more. Specific feedback on each post can be found in the comments section on each post.

Preliminary Task

This is my front cover of the  magazine for my prelim task. First of all i took a picture which i then edited in photoshop. I cut around the image so that the background will be deleted, leaving me with the image that i wanted. I then used in design so that  I could develop my front cover.

I created a new page and then  imported the image. I added the name of the magazine and the blue background colour and then inserted other text that i wanted on the page. I made some of the text boxes a different shade of blue and then i made them slightly transparent so that it made the front cover look more authentic. I also added the minor details such as the date at the top and then a barcode at the bottom of the page.

I think that when i do my music magazine front cover i would need to get all the minor details as well as all the major ones because it needs to look as real as possible. I think that it should also have a clear title as well as the magazine name in big text.  The image for the front cover should probably be similar to the one that i have used for this one. I think that it should dominate the front cover and then have the text going around it. I think that it is important that the front cover is not too congested and that it is simple but effective making what you want the reader to look at the attention grabber. 

This is the mock up of my contents page. It has the name of the magazine in the top corner with the words contents at the top. Each image that is displayed on the page shows a page number so that they are easily to find and it also has text explaining what each image is about. Also the featured articles have a brief explanation with a sentence summing it up and then a page number. Everything is spread out so that it isn't clustered and confusing for the reader which can be off putting for reading the rest if the magazine.  Everything that was written on the front page as a feature is included with the brief explanation underneath it. It is important that the contents page is good because otherwise the reader might not want to read it and then the amount of people reading it will decrease. 

Indie popularity

Not many indie songs break into the top 40. The audience is a niche audience so it is overwelmed by the other genres that are extremely popular such as pop which has a mainstream audience. However indie fans are more loyal to the artists that they like and are more likely to buy their albums rather than just downloading the one song that they like. For example the kings of leon didnt get into the singles chart this week but they are 8th in the albums chart. This means that if you are in this genre you may not sell a lot most of the time but it means that you are going to get people buying more regulary and the fans are more willing to pay money towards that genre. This means that even though the indie followers aren't as high in numbers than the mainstream audiences they will be willing enough to pay money so the magazine will be able to gain enough fans if it is good.

Circulation figures

For indie magazines the sales rate is quite high.For instance the two biggets are NME and Kerrang. From wikipedia the information tells us that  NME has a total circulationn of up to 40,000 per week and Kerrang has a total circulation of up to 43,000 per week. The readers are quite loyal and they will continue to buy the magazine. These figures prove that there is enough demand in the market to make the magazine successful.

Contents page

This is the mock up of my contents page. It has the name of the magazine in the top corner with the words contents at the top. Each image that is displayed on the page shows a page number so that they are easily to find and it also has text explaining what each image is about. Also the featured articles have a brief explanation with a sentence summing it up and then a page number. Everything is spread out so that it isn't clustered and confusing for the reader which can be off putting for reading the rest if the magazine.  Everything that was written on the front page as a feature is included with the brief explanation underneath it. It is important that the contents page is good because otherwise the reader might not want to read it and then the amount of people reading it will decrease.