Thursday 16 October 2014

Planning: Masthead

Today I created my masthead for my magazine. This wont necessarily be the finished product but none the less it is a start.I created it in pages rather than 'indesign' because I believe it is more friendly and easier to use. But I may change my mind by the time I really start to put detail into it. It was simple stuff, I just put in my heading with my chosen font and started messing about with shapes to get a cool effect but not looking too tacky or un-professional. Next I am going to try to include some images on the masthead, for example put a faded guitar in the background.


Tuesday 14 October 2014

Planning: Target Audience


Detailed target audience
My rock magazine will appeal to a very wide category of people from ages 16 to about 50. This is because the classic rock content can stretch back to the 70’s to modern day so there will be a wide range of people that the magazine will appeal to. And in this blog post I am going to create an ideal reader of the magazine to show who I am trying to market this product to.

Name: Darren
Age: 29
Race: White
Socio-demographic: C1
Gender: Male


This is Darren, he is 29 years old and enjoys classic rock music. Darren lives in a one bedroom flat in Sheffield with his dog Terry. He listens to rock bands like  KISS, Aerosmith and Motley Crue and has seen many classic rock acts like Def Leppard in their prime back in the 80’s so he has grown up from birth listening to this kind of classic rock music. This type of music also effects the way he dresses, leather jackets, ripped black skinny jeans and leather boots. Also when he was younger he had long black hair like the bands he idolized and still idolizes. He works a 9-5 job, working in a call centre and rock music is his escape from the boring reality of work. He has an AC-DC live photo pinned in his work cubicle and a Megadeth cd in his car stereo. Darren also likes to keep up with technology buying things like I-Pads, I-phones e.t.c. He is also a keen TV and movie fan and watches at least one movie a day when he gets home from work. His claim to fame is that he watched the entire breaking bad series in one day. Darren also enjoys fast food like McDonalds, Chinese and Burger King and has various empty food dishes from these restaurants lying around his flat. HE is very loud, outspoken and says what he thinks, this can often lead to fall-outs with friends or drunken fights in bars. He also enjoys socializing with his friends like going out for a drink, going to gigs or going bowling and playing snooker.


Planning: Magazine Moodboard


Monday 13 October 2014

Planning: Magazine names + Fonts


Magazine names
  • The Grind
  • GR!T
  • Pyromania

These are the three magazine names I have created, but I must narrow it down to one. The name I have chosen for my magazine is “The Grind”, I have chosen this because I believe it matches with the dark, gritty, hard rock theme I am going for.

Fonts for the masthead:
The grind 
Font: Caravel


The Grind
Font: Metamorphous




The Grind 
Font: Pure Evil II

All the fonts I have chosen have a gothic look about them with the arches and sharp edges. I have chosen these fonts because they match with the hard classic rock theme I am applying to my magazine. But I am yet to narrow it down to one font. Fonts are very important because they can really sum up what your magazine is about, many good fonts can cost about £5000 to use or download.

Thursday 9 October 2014

Research: In-design (first attempt)

This is my first attempt at using in-design. Obviously I will go through it thoroughly when I do it in my magazine but this was just the prelim and it's the first time I have used it so I was getting to grips with it. There is many things I must fix like the white gap next to the heading or the space between the text and the photo. I think that pages is far easier to use, but despite being more complicated in-design is much more worth it when you see the clean finished product.

Tuesday 7 October 2014

Research: Magazine covers & Influences

In order to make sure my magazine is top quality and looks professional I have been getting Ideas from other music magazines like Kerrang, Classic rock, Metal hammer and many more. All of these magazines concentrate on near enough the same music, which happens to also be to same music genre as mine, classic rock music. The reason why I have chosen to look at so many different magazines is because i want to get as many ideas as I can in order to make my magazine the best it can be. For example Kerrang has a very hard rock look. The masthead is dark and has sharp, fuzzy writing. All of the headings on the front cover are messy and are slapped on across the page with different colours and fonts, it looks quite messy. And the same can be said for Metal Hammer, headings all across the front page, no real order of anything, lots of big bold font and the very metal looking artists on the cover. But this matches with the hard rock theme of the magazine. But with Classic Rock and Rolling Stone it is very different. It still deals with near enough the same kind of music, but the layout of the magazine is very very different. They tend to stick to one colour scheme on each issue and the font is more plain and simple with not as much going on, trying to keep it simple and clean.
I have blogged this because I wanted to explain my thought process behind this, I want to combine these different magazines into one. I want to have a hard rock themed cover but also at the same time I would like to keep it clean and simple. Below are some examples of the magazines I was talking about.
Kerrang
Rolling Stone
Metal Hammer
Classic Rock