My Music Magazine Front Cover Layout

I am now beginning to construct my magazine but first its important to get a brief understanding of what my aim is, by aim I mean how my music magazine is going to look like. This is important as when I am going to be creating certain thins on Photoshop on pictures the colours will all have to match up together and also to make sure nothing overlaps or gets in the way of each other especially text, by creating a magazine layout I can carefully begin to plan and create certain parts of my magazine and place them in the areas shown on this layout.

Using Photoshop Part two

 My aim was to make this image of Scarlett Johannsson with her lips bright red and the background faded thus bringing our attention to the only colourful thing on the page.

 Firstly i used a magic wand tool around the lips and then deleted everything else from the page.

Then I placed the same image back again this meant the lips were separate from the image as I just removed the lips from the second image. then I made the second image black and white and placed the lips onto where they were meant to be.

Contents page brief research

In today's media lesson my teacher went in depth about the importance of contents pages and how it is important to make them look very professional, so I decided it would be of relevance to look at certain contents pages of music magazines to gain a better insight as to what goes into them so as that when I come around to making my own I will have a better understanding of what I should contain within it, by doing this I will be able to make a good magazine that appeals to the target audience.

Below you will find 2 magazine contents pages that I have chosen to look at in order to gain a better understanding of music magazines, the two contents pages are from different magazines and are of different styles so by doing this I can see how differently contents pages are.
The colour scheme for example is different as the Kerrang magazine cover on the left features darker colours and the Q magazine cover on the right is very much lighter.

Lilly Allen Analysis

This is a music magazine analysis from the internet that someone has done on a double page spread for Lilly Allen, This is relevant as its research as to why things are done for some double page spread compared to why other things are done.

Magazine Title name & Typography

College Magazine Analysis

Below is a video of PowToon where I have analysed my college magazine pages.

College Magazine Contents page

Below is my college magazine contents page, this page is linked and related to the double page spread as the back ground uses graph paper which students use as revision material and this page may seem boring but in my eyes a college magazine wont be as exciting as a music magazine would be so I wanted to make a realistic style magazine with limited pictures also so as that the audience will focus solely on whats inside the magazine by looking at the text which stands out on the white background.

College magazine Double Page Spread

Below is a picture of my college magazine double page spread, I have played with the theme of revision such as jotting down notes in order to symbolise a students coursework or revision notes. It seems very cluttered and unprofessional but this is done for that purpose to make it play with the audience's mind that this was created by a student who is taking his notes.

College Magazine Front Cover (Mark two)

I have done more research into photoshop and got a better understanding at how to use it, i have also taken feedback from my teachers as to what i needed to improve on and i have created this college magazine front page as a stepping stone to a music magazine front cover.

Top Selling Music Singles of 2013

The top selling singles, are the following:-

1. Blurred Lines - Robin Thicke featuring T.I. and Pharrell Williams

2. Get Lucky - Daft Punk featuring Pharrell Williams

3. Wake Me Up - Avicii

4. Let Her Go - Passenger

5. La La La - Naughty Boy featuring Sam Smith

6. Roar - Katy Perry

7. Thrift Shop - Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

8. Just Give Me A Reason - Pink featuring Nate Ruess

9. Counting Stars - OneRepublic

10. Mirrors - Justin Timberlake

From looking at these music singles its clear that the top music genre was pop and R&B.  Blurred lines was a song that was heard throughout hundreds of radio stations around the UK millions of times and was highly controversial as its unrated music video featured topless women dancing around men. This acted as a good talking point which means more publicity and advertising which could of attributed to the enormous downloads of the single.

The other songs featured here are of the same/similar genre they are all happy upbeat songs with a positive tune. Other factors that affected the chart updates were the release date as Blurred lines was released just before august as a party song, so many people played it at parties and downloaded it for this purpose.