Saturday, 3 March 2012

Making a Magazine Look Professional

For the last couple of weeks I have been analysing sucessful chart music magazines such as 'Q' and 'Blender'. Both of these magazines target a large audience, and paticularly 'Blender', aims for a young audience, something I wish to do myself. Using inspiration from both of these and others, I have planned a basic design for my own magazine, along with an ideas sheet with all of my preliminary ideas. Further on in my project, I will use these to look back on and influence my ideas frombasic, to a higher level.

From continual research, this week I concentrated on the key features which make a magazine look professional. With this research I found the following:

Front Cover:
 - Full page picture, must be high quality, in focus and not stretched.
 - The colour scheme should pick out a 1 or 2 colours from the photograph, eg. the models eye colour, clothing, make up.
 - Too much empty space should be filled with something such as a banner, image, feature story.
 - Barcode, date and issue number are always needed.
 - Different font for title and features but do not allow them to clash.

Contents Page:
 - Either blocky or image based.
 - Intregrate text and pictures so that they are not completley serperate. eg. quotes and taglines on pictures.
 - Don't choose too many colours which clash.
 - Limit fonts and make sure they match with music genre.
 - Page number and a magazine logo
 - Extras such as a editors introduction or a
 - Clear layout such as keeping 'features' and 'regulars' seperated.

Double Page Spread:
 - Font and colour scheme match music artist and their genre.
 - Taglines and inserted quotes.
 - Photo overlaps centre line slightly.
 - Headline, sub-title and a small intro.
 - Use the magazines house style.
 - Usually 3 columns of text, if there is extra space, try and fill with a small related feature if the page looks too empty.

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