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.

Day 6: 15 hour exam Proceed

I wanted Proceed to be a very simple article layout because there had been a lot of busy and colourful article pages beforehand.

I experimented with 3D effects, different fonts and colours. The sub title is a play on words with one of Proceed's songs: First in a Long Line. I thought including it in a sub title was was effective and I got this inspiration from Kerrang! magazine who do it very often with their articles.

For my first few ideas, I tried putting the photos I was going to use into a collage but it looked a bit messy so I decided to make them straight and it looked a bit better but I realised that it wasn't the pictures that was making it messy, it was the layout of the text. Originally, the photos were all clumped together but further on in my development, I spread them out so that three were on one side and two were on the other side.


For the final idea, I used idea ten because I had made the layout suitable to fit the pictures into an order that looked professional and didn't look to busy. Because of using the five photos, the white background kept the simplicity intact and so did the plain black title and sub title.

Day 5: 15 hour exam Invaders

Invaders was going to be laid out in a completely different way to what I had done before this. I was going to put this article spread out over a double page spread and I knew that it was going to be difficult.

I was proven right when I had to align the title: 'Invaders Invade the British Music Scene'. The title also ran over the two pages so to align them so that they were all straight was proving to be very difficult because I also had to align the text of the article around the title. I started off with very few pictures because I didn't want the title page to be cramped. I didn't want any pictures on the page where the article was going to go because I wanted to letters of the title to act as pictures for the second page. After some development, I realised that the title page was looking too bare with just two pictures, so I increased the amount to five and it looked much better because there wasn't any dead space.

For this article, I decided to go for idea eight because the white title was big and bold and simple. It was between idea four or eight. I quite liked idea four because the drop shadow was very effective. But after asking twenty people which idea they liked best, 75% chose idea eight because they thought that the simplicity worked well with the black background and the images.

Day 4: 15 hour exam Sweet Jonny

I had quite a few ideas for this article. Even though there wasn't that much text, I only used four pictures. I had laid the title out so that the three columns of text gave enough room for a few pictures to anchor the text.


I experimented with different coloured backgrounds and different fonts. However, I found a font I really liked and I kept it nearly throughout the whole development. I also experimented with 3D effects and it worked really well with idea sixteen. This was probably my second favourite idea.

For this page, I had to choose between ideas five, six, nine and sixteen. All these ideas stood out the most to me however, I thought that there might be too much red within the magazine if I picked an idea with a red background so I decided to go for idea six as my final idea.

I liked the dark green colour for the background because it gave the page a grunge feel to it that I really liked. The band 'Sweet Jonny' is grunge band so the colour works with the genre.

Day 3: 15 hour exam The Kinison

When I first thought of making my own magazine for Unit 3, it was also helpful that I write my own blog in my spare time. For my own blog, I interview bands and write articles about them. So all the text on each of the articles is my own.

The Kinison article is short which meant I had to put a few more pictures on than I normally would but expanding the size of the title meant I could delete a picture to stop it from looking too busy. Throughout the development of this page, I had to choose pictures carefully because they had to fit around the text and there had to be no dead space. Because I had to choose the pictures carefully, it was hard to pick the best layout for the article. 

I had to try out different fonts and colours. I didm't want any of the pages in the magazine to look similar in any way so the fonts had to be completely different. I wanted to keep the background white because I didn't want too many pages with coloured backgrounds. I also think that this particular page looks better with a white background because there are so many pictures and the white gives the page a bit of simplicity. A coloured background would have been too much.

The final layout for the magazine that I chose incorporated a few of the individual ideas that I had and in the end, I think it looked very effective.

Day 2: 15 hour exam - contents page and editors letter

During the 2nd day of the fifteen hour exam, I designed different ideas for the contents page and the editors letter.

At first, I started with a basic outline of what was going to go where and started out with a plain white background. As my ideas developed, I started changing the fonts and the colours of the text. I made a final decision that the whole of my magazine would be laid out in three columns so it looked more professionally.

I really liked the yellow for the contents page because I thought it was really bright and eye catching and different; a colour that you wouldn't normally see in a rock magazine.

I then went on to designing the editors letter. I collected a few examples from Vogue, Rocksound, Kerrang! and SciFiNow magazine. The one that I really liked was the editors letter from Vogue. There was a big chunk of writing with loads of pictures round the text and I think that this was really effective.

My final idea for this page reflects the inspiration that Vogue gave me and my final idea was idea 17.

Day 1: 15 hour exam - the cover

I knew that designing the cover was going to take a lot of time because I wanted it to look as much like a professional rock music magazine as possible.


 
I first started out by using gradient backgrounds but soon realised that these didn't work at all, so I then moved on to using just a plain black background. Throughout the designing of the front cover, I was experimenting with different fonts and different coloured backgrounds. At the end of the design phase, I had to make a decision between ideas 18, 25 and 28. My final choose was idea 25 because I think that the font worked really well with the idea of the magazine and the colour, 3D effect and the background colour worked really well together.

I then needed to figure out the final layout of my magazine and needed to figure out where the double page spreads would go and some photos would overlap on the double page spreads so those pages needed to be together. I sketched a plan out in my sketchbook but later then realised that I needed to shift the order of the pages around for it to work.


I then invited two of my friends round my house and then took photos of them posing since they were both going to be the main cover story and I need images to anchor the article. I tried Layla with an electric and an acoustic guitar (these were going to be the cover image) and the electric guitar worked better with the theme of the magazine.

After photoshopping the images that I was going to use, I was ready to do the front cover and start the 15 hour exam.

After I did the first four tasks, I then decided it was time to start researching different graphics designers for both my CD sleeve and the front cover of my magazine.
There were a couple of designers that particularly stood out to me for the design of my own CD sleeve and they were John Moss and Sean Freeman. Both designers work are cardboard sleeves that fold together and the CD just fits inside and I think that this will work really well with my design.

The designer that inspired me for my front cover was a photo by Horst P. Horst that was took for Vogue magazine in May 1991. Alexander Lieberman took Horst's photo and then designed the cover for Vogue. This image really inspired me and you can see this inspiration on the front of my own magazine.