Transition

Yes, I have decided to call my magazine Transition and as it is now the Christmas holidays I have been unable to use my desired program of Microsoft Publisher to create my music magazine, so instead I have used Microsoft Word which I can use at home.

I have spent a while creating my front cover, and I will post the first draft below:



After finishing creating I asked for some critical feedback from some of the target audience and they made these points:

• I don't like the blue on the yellow, it makes it look cheap
• The grey boxes behind the writing is a little odd
• include more writing on it
• play around with more fonts
• don't leave so much space
• i like the title its really bold and makes a statement
• the main feature looks good
• too much blue - try and include other colours that compliment blue, like a nice green...or different shades of blue
• really like the front cover
• Dave's leg looks a bit weird
• It would sound better as 'Why they split' rather than 'why the split'

So I took their comments into consideration and I will post the updated version soon along with the front cover and double page spread. All of which I intend to get some feedback for by posting the images online and/or asking people and videoing it. Altogether the feedback however, was positive and most people liked it and thought it looked quite professional.

I have been finding it very useful to look at other magazine front covers, as I have gathered a collection of music magazines and using them as a basis for my magazine, obviously adding my magazine's own style. I also feel I have become more confident using Microsoft Word as a program to create a magazine. I am also very pleased with how my images have turned out - although if I had the opportunity after having the first session of editing I would have liked to have taken another set of photos; however this is not possible. But I think the images I have chosen work well and suit the genre of magazine.

Simple plans for the music magazine

Here are the simple layout plans for my music magazine, I have chosen to stick to my blue/white/black theme throughout the magazine.

Progression

I have decided I am going to call my magazine 'Transition' or 'Deviant'. To decide which name I am going to use, I am going to create my front cover first and then place the name at the top and see which looks better and more professional for a music magazine name. I think 'Transition' is slightly more popular from my recent survey which I did via text to get quick results, so that is the most likely.

I have begun to edit my photos for my magazine - the front cover one has been quite difficult as I am using Photoshop, which I haven't used that much really but I had a bit of a practice a little while ago (I will post a couple of these images below). But I am not a Photoshop genius. Anyway, I have been attempting to get the image of just the four members of 'The Riley's for my front cover as I (think) I want them placed on a black or maybe white background - depending on what suits the image better as this is the conventional use of front cover image I have found through my research. I am going to go and edit that image now and then hopefully have my front cover finished tonight.

Name of the magazine & Update

On Friday I took my photos ready for my music magazine, the photoshoot went well and the music was fun; The Rileys are lovely people and I enjoyed the night a lot.

I will also upload some photos from the photoshoot & gig below, once I have edited them and chosen which ones I would like to use for my front page, contents page and double page spread. But I feel I have enough images however I would've liked them to have been better quality but as my camera broke before Friday I had to borrow one from a friend.

I would've quite liked to have used the image above in my magazine, however the quality is bad and the image is quite blurry and so I didn't as I thought it would detract from the magazines authenticity.

The second point to this blog is to make a final decision for the name of my magazine, here is the list of Maybe's left:
Pop Rock Today
Sound
Unpublished
Prock
Deviant
PopRock
Buzz
Transition
Ropazine
RP
JUMP
BacktoBeatSix
TRIP (Techno Rock Indie Pop)
Rocky Road
Rave!


I have decided to not call it the ones in orange.

So I have been left with 5 names, which I am going to do a quick survey for, via text as this is probably the quickest way to find out which name people think is the best. Here are the results:
Deviant: 6
Buzz: 1
Transition: 7
TRIP: 4
Rave!: 2

Decision will be coming soon!

Survey Monkey Research Evaluation

Seeing as I have 33 responses to my survey now, I am going to post some of answers, some in text form some in chart form:

Colours


Which artists/bands would you like to see features on?
The main bands mentioned were:
Go:Audio, You Me At Six, The Mission District, The Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, McFly, Fall Out Boy, All Time Low, Paramore, Mika, JLS, Twenty Twenty, Katy Perry, 3OH!3, Kings Of Leon, Vagabond, Saving Aimee, We the Kings, etc.

Adverts
They would prefer for them to mainly be Music&Entertainment Related (72.7%) but other suggestions included:
Fashion, Anything relevant to young people, Cosmetics.

What content would you like?
97% wanted Interviews
90.9% wanted Articles and Single/Album Reviews
78.8% wanted Gig Reviews
63.6% wanted Competitions
36.4% wanted Film Related Material
33.3% wanted TV Related Material
24.2% wanted Games
6.1% wanted Video Game Related Material

What style of font would you like?
Bold, Catchy, Clear, Bold titles, tahoma? comic sans?, large and grungy, easy to read, arial, easy to read for main writing but a big cool one for title, any but not curly.

What prizes would appeal to you?
90.9% wanted Gig Tickets
81.8% wanted to Meet/Interview Bands
72.7% wanted T-Shirts
66.7% wanted Posters
54.5% wanted Other Merch
45.5% wanted Free Sub to the Magazine

How many pages would you like the magazine to be?
14 people said Up to 40
9 said Up to 60
5 said Up to 80
4 said Up to 100
1 said 100+

How much would you pay?
19 said £3 or less which is the obvious majority

How often would you like it to be released?
14 said Fortnightly
10 said Weekly
8 said Monthly

Hopefully these results will help me decide on how to create my music magazine and what I should promote on the front cover as to make people buy the magazine. Also, which sort of bands I should feature and ultimately what content there should be i.e. what I should do for my double page spread. I have decided to do an interview and a gig review for this.