Day 13: Finishing it all off

The last step of the whole process was printing everything off and putting it all together.

I made an A3 page and worked out which pages would have to go where when folded together. It took a lot off re arranging but I finally got the order that the magazine would run in and this meant I had to change the contents page slightly. Once I had printed everything off and stapled it together, I printed off the CD sleeve and put that together.

I now have a finished product.

Day 12: Final CD sleeve ideas

Using photoshop and a template for a CD sleeve, I combined all of my ideas for the final idea. I used different colour combinations. After experimenting with different combinations, I came up with two final ideas.

I really liked the idea of using the band album covers in a collage and using the collage for the background of my own CD. It was effective, eye catching and different. My other final idea was having the bands names in the background, repeated over and over again. If I had have stuck to my initial idea and have two different CDs 'on sale', these would have been the two. However, since I had changed my mind to only having the one, I decided to go with the idea that had the different bands album covers as the background.

Day 11: 15 hour exam Final CD sleeve ideas and CD back cover ideas

I took these final CD ideas from the range of ideas from Task 2: Mixing It Up and Task 3: 3D from the beginning of the year. I narrowed them down to five of my best ideas using. I use 3D effects as it corresponds to the same design that I use for the logo on the front cover.

Then I had to design a back cover for the CD sleeve. I thought that including the logo of my magazine was a must. My initial idea was to have two final CDs that readers could choose from (you see this in quite a few magazines) but in the end, I decided that I would just have one final idea.

My ideas for the back cover ranged in colours but the one consistency was the logo on the back. After looking at existing CD back covers from magazines and general bands, the norm seemed to the song titles placed in the middle of the back cover and you can see this in ideas five, seven, nine and ten.

My final choices from all of my ideas would be ideas four, five, eight, nine, ten and eleven.

Day 10: Next Week and One.Five

After looking at a lot of existing 'Next Week' pages, I saw that most were very busy and bursting with information about next week or next months issue.

Throughout the development, I wanted to find the right colour scheme and a page that would attract the readers attention about the different bands that would be in the next issue. The colours and the text had to advertise the bands. I made 'Next Week' as big and as bold as I could without diverting attention from the main image and the other bands. I used the actual logo of 'Tonight Alive' so that readers would instantly be able to recognise who was being advertised. 

I was originally going to keep 'BACK!' as white but I saw that all the colour was at the top of the page and that I needed some colour at the bottom too. Blue wasn't bright enough but then I thought that red connotes danger, stop and is the colour to attract attention so I used red.

For my final idea, I incorporated ideas four and eight and I think that it worked really well because it has the business that an existing magazine has. The colours used also anchor the images and that works too. 

The main cover image is of my friend and I was going to use her and her boyfriend as the band that would be the main feature of the magazine. I asked them to pretend to be a band and asked them both questions that feature in the article and asked them to be creative about a band name and album name. 'One.Five' derives from their joke about each other: one and a half so they decided to change it to 'One.Five' so that their 'band name' was short and snappy and wouldn't "take ages to say" according to Tom.

I started out with a very basic layout for the magazine and this was the page that was probably the most rushed because I did it at the very end of the magazine process. After printing the double page spread out, I knew that it didn't have the same detail as the other page and the yellow backgrounds on the second page wasn't working and made the page looked unprofessional. I decided that I would have to take more photos of them so I could get rid of the ones on the second page and include some more. I took a couple more photos and they both turned out really well so I used them. Readers can still tell that it might have been a bit rushed but the new images definitely improve the look of the article. I used this for my final idea.

Day 9: 15 hour exam The Dead Famous

The layout for this article was took from Task 4: Composition and Layout at the beginning of the year so this made it a lot easier and quicker for me to develop ideas. I used the collage idea from Task 3: 3D for this article and it works really well with how it's going down the side of the both pages.

I incorporated one of their songs into the sub title for this article too. They have a song called 'Hide Your Halo' and yet again, I thought it worked really well with the idea of the article and their EP. For this article, I just had to play around with different fonts and to find the perfect one was very hard. I didn't want to use a stereotypical 'rock' font and this is what you can see in idea two. It would also be a very obvious font to use because of the word 'Dead' in the bands name.

I had to choose between ideas one, three, four and seven. In the end, I chose idea three because I liked the serif and I also thought that I had used too many 'blocky' fonts throughout the magazine.

Day 8: 15 hour exam Hollywood Undead/Fall Out Boy

Both of these articles are very short so I decided to put them both on one page. At first, I thought it would be cramped and not enough space but I only used one image for each text and then it fit onto the one page. Getting both of the titles to fit was also a pain because with one title being longer than the other meant that 'Fall Out Boy' had to be stretched a bit more and made to look the same as the 'Hollywood Undead' title. For this to work, I had to mess around with the text and make it smaller so both the titles fit onto the page.

After being so careful with how much red was in the magazine, I saw that there wasn't any red so I decided to make the background for this page to be bright red. I either wanted the text to be black or white and it was very difficult to decided which one looked better and looked more effective. I thought that having white for the titles and black for the text was a really good contrast so I went with idea thirteen for my final idea.

If I had the time, I would have made the article into two pages because it would be nice to see more images for both, especially for these two because they are very big bands. However, if I made them separate articles it would make the number of articles uneven and I would have to include another article for the magazine to work and not have any blank pages.

Day 7: 15 hour exam The Product

The article for The Product was going to be another double page spread however this was more difficult to design that the Invaders spread because the main article image was going to have to be split into two because of the size of the image. It overlapped onto the second page and aligning the two halves of the image was hard because the image had split one of the band members in half so I had to align is body up perfectly.

There was quite a lot of text for this article so a lot of images wasn't necessary. Having the main article image cover three columns levelled out the text and made sure that the text fit perfectly onto the other page.

The title is yet another play on words with one of their songs called: Make Your Move. It fit very well into the concept of it being a new band and them coming onto the music scene. Coming up with a perfect font for this article was hard because I didn't want to use one that had already been used for another article.

For the final idea, I chose idea three because the font I used was a close resemblance to the actual bands logo and I thought that the resemblance was effective. I also really like the 3D effect of idea six but it looked a bit too bold.