Contents Page

Contents Page

I am currently making progress on my contents page for my magazine 'Smoke and Mirrors', I am unable to upload a picture of it at this moment in time due to my Photoshop not being able to open the document, so I am unable to change the image from a PSD to a JPG. I will do this when I have access to Photoshop on one of the school computers tomorrow (20/11/12). I can, however, tell you what it is going to include. First of all it is obviously going to contain the name of the contents going down the right hand side of the page with the title 'Smoke and Mirrors Contents' at the top. The headings for these shall be, in no particular order (because I don't remember specifically): 'Interviews', 'Features', 'Competitions', 'Reviews' and 'Celebrity News'. I am basing my magazine contents page of that of 'Kerrang' magazine, despite the fact that I am not doing that genre of music magazine, I liked the layout and thought it would fit my magazine well. Here is an example of 'Kerrang' magazine's contents layout:

Initial Ideas

Initial Ideas

This post will include my initial ideas towards my front cover, contents page and my double page spread of my magazine, I will include some real life examples of magazines that are my stylistic influences and what I am going to change to make my ideas original and unique. I will also analyse these magazines in detail to show where I got my stylistic influences from and why I like them in the first place. The two magazines that I am going to analyse are 'Q' magazine and 'NME' magazine as they fit in with the type of magazine that I would like to create. However, the two magazine types that I have chosen to analyse both hold features that I would like to include in my own magazine 'Smoke and Mirrors', this is because NME is for a specific genre, whereas Q has a wider variety of musicians and acts contained within it it. 

My first initial idea for my magazine was to do a rock genre magazine, but then I decided to change the genre as I wouldn't be able to fulfill the requirements of the specification if I were to do so. I changed the genre to a more modern, up to date pop/mixed genre of music magazine as I  found it easier to write about and would be able to create a magazine based on it. I will include my analysis to real life magazine products in my next post so that they can be separate from this post itself.

First Draft of My Front Cover

This is the first draft of my front cover for my magazine 'Smoke and Mirrors', it is not the final draft and I had some editing to do on the layout and adding more articles onto the page as it looks a little bare right now. I also need to edit the background a little as it is a little too dark for the style that I wanted. I can easily do this on Photoshop and change the brightness and contrast so that it doesn't look as dark and dull looking. I am also going to change the colour of the title as it does not fit in with the colour scheme of the magazine that I want to create. I would also like to make the font size a little bigger on the articles that are on the side of the page.