Drafts of my Front Cover

For my original draft of my indie music magazine, I started by taking pictures of some of my peers that go to my school in order to see if any of them would fit the look of "indie." The first draft that I experimented with was this page below.

 I started my first draft by taking a picture of a guy with a guitar because I thought he looked "chilled out" and individual. Nevertheless, when editing him on Photoshop I couldn't quite get the layout right and therefore had to disregard this image overall. I used the magnetic crop tool to cut out the background of the image from the man, however, I had a problem with it and it didn't crop everything I needed out, therefore I went back and cropped more but it took parts of his arm off. This definitely did not look real, although I did learn a lot in how to use that specific tool for when it came to actually making my real music magazine. I also found that the position that the artist was in did not really work that well with the whole lay out of the magazine. I chose this grey coloured background because I thought it would fit in with the indie genre although when looking at other indie pop magazines, I realised that grey was not the colour to use. I liked the masthead because it looked unique but in my opinion it was too stretched out when I look back at it and it had to change. I liked how the taglines included names of artists as it would grab the attention of the reader nevertheless, I think it needed a caption of what the article would be about inside the magazine.      

This was my second draft of my music magazine and in my opinion it was only a little better than the first. I decided that the image of the artist in my first draft wasn't working out because of the position he was in, as well as the camera shot, so I then took some new pictures of others that I thought would look the part of an indie pop star and I placed all the artists in this way on the page. I figured that when I had just about finished my second draft, I realised it looked like a pop magazine rather than an indie pop one. I wasn't happy with it so I had to start again. Although I wasn't happy with the positioning of each artist, I did like the masthead that is portrayed here. It made the page look less pop and more independent and unique. I liked the font and I knew it was the best option to bring it forward onto my next draft. Another aspect that I want keen on within this page was the colour of the writing "Jack Murphy." I realise now that the 'Y' is really hard to see as it is sitting on the hair of the female artist and that needs to change when making the next draft. I loved the way I positioned Yasmin's name and with the font and colour of it. It really stood out and portrayed to the audience that Yasmin will be a main feature in this magazine. I experimented with the words of "Exclusive" and "New" because when I researched what makes a good magazine, I found that using phrases such as these would attract the readers attention, forcing them to buy it. I used the colour of blue from my preliminary task on the phrase at the bottom because blue is a "cool" colour and would make the reader feel relaxed when reading it, and this is the effect I would like to have in my reader overall.



This was the third draft that I made and I realised out of all three front covers, it was the best one. This is because of the black background most of all in my opinion. I realised that other colours for a background didn't really work as it made the magazine look more pop than individual. As said before, I want my readers to feel relaxed and chilled when they go through the magazine and a black background with white writing has that effect as well as Alfie's top conforming to the concept of 'chilled out' with the use of his blue top. I brought in the font of the masthead from the daft before because I liked how it looked on the page, however, I squeezed the word when editing it to make it look longer. I chose a different artist to the ones before on the other drafts because I thought the reason it wasn't working was because of the artist and I think I was right. Although, I was still struggling to make the outline of each persona real. I came to a conclusion that I had to take a picture of an artist with a background that would be close to black, so that I wouldn't have artists on my magazine that didn't look real.