Main Task - Music Magazine Contents Page Second Draft

This is the second draft of my contents page, and it took me a long time to do all the changes. This is primarily because each line of text is in its own text box, and I had to go through and individually re-position each one and move text from one line/text box to another line/text box. You may also notice that all the text has been compressed slightly; this was to make room for the new picture I added. I removed the old man due to criticism from both my peers and myself, and replaced it with a picture relating to one of the main stories. This actually makes the contents page more realistic, since it is more likely that there will be a picture relating to one of the features which the magazine is showing off about rather than depicting one of the regulars at the very bottom of the page.
The image I used was cut out from one of the first photos I took, though I did not post it with the others. That's why I'm posting it here, for your convenience -->
I had to edit the photo quite a lot; I removed Jonny's spots, got rid of his red eyes, lassoed around him before doing the finishing cutting out touches with the eraser and then used the blur tool to smooth out his edges. I put a frame around the cut out Jonny and applied a stroke and drop shadow effect to it. I decided to fill in the frame's background in red, though whether I'm going to keep it like that I'm not sure as it looks quite obtrusive. I finished it up with a lens flare effect and a suitable caption.
Despite definitely making the contents page more interesting the picture forced me to move all the text around which was extremely annoying and time-consuming. I did it though, but I feel that perhaps the original text layout was a little better. There's not really much I can do about this, as if I had kept the original text layout there would have been no room to insert another picture. Also the re-arranging of the text meant that I had to change some of the text slightly to make it shorter and allow it to fit in, such as "Sexii's House" to "Doobey" (fortunately removing the band name "Sexii's House" was no great loss, though unfortunately the replacement name wasn't any better).
The final things I did were to change the page number of the Kerry Anne story and move the caption referencing it up slightly. I made the former of these changes when I realised that a double-page spread would have to start on an even number, and the latter change was made to try and make it look like there was less blank space.
If I do make any further changes to this contents page it will likely only be small things, like the background in the picture of Jonny.

Music Magazine Contents Page First Draft - Step-by-step

As you will soon see, there were much fewer steps involved in the creation of the contents page than there were in the creation of the front cover. This is due to the fact that the contents page is made up mainly of text, and since text is very easy to edit one doesn't need to save their work quite so regularly as when working with layout and images. I did say before though that there are going to be a lot of changes, so chances are there will be many more production steps after the ones shown. Before the actual stages though, I am going to show the rough contents ideas/plans that I drew out and scanned in:

Although I had actually already applied effects in Photoshop to the main photo a while before deciding to use it, I shall try to remember in detail what I did to it. I know the main thing I did was pump up the contrast and brightness. I also experimented with lighting effects, but only applied very small ones as they made too much of a difference otherwise. I also changed the exposure, offset and gamma correction settings. The overall combination of these effects made the picture's background mostly completely white, whitened Kerry's face and made less thick strands of hair appear as a sort of yellowy light, and despite my lack of technical image terms I thought all of which looked pretty cool. I then just had to cut around Kerry using the lasso and then put the picture into a contents page-sized canvas.
Now the image had been sorted I next decided to put a smaller version of my masthead at the top left of the page, so as to reinforce the idea of a house-style/brand identity. Next to it I put a date and issue number to comply with music magazine conventions; I also made the font they were in Oceania which is the same font used for the masthead. I added a caption for the photo which would tell the reader what story the picture relates to and on which page one can find out more. I did this because from my music magazine research I saw that nearly all photos on the contents page have a caption such as this, and so my having one would further allow me to abide by music magazine conventions and therefore make my magazine look more realistic. At this point I used the Calibri font, due to its simplicity which made it unobtrusive and easy to read. The final thing I did during this first stage was add a "Features" heading, since as can be seen from my plans I had already decided to separate my contents page into the three categories of Features, Regulars and Reviews.

Here I added the other two section headings of "Reviews" and "Regulars". I changed the font for these and "Features" from Tahoma bold to Lucida Sans Typewriter; the reason for this was that I felt the Tahoma bold font became too fat-looking when made the text a bigger size, and when I took off the bold it looked too skinny. I tried a variety of different fonts and found that Lucida Sans Typewriter looked fairly similar but wasn't what I considered too fat or skinny. I then changed the font of the photo's caption to Lucida Sans because it was just as comfortably simple as Calibri and also meant that I wouldn't have to use too many different fonts, since that could have made the contents page look tacky and unprofessional (my research showed that music magazines try to limit the number of fonts they use unless they're going for a specific feeling, such as scary or happy). For this same reason I also used Lucinda Sans for my page number, my Kerry Anne heading and my story summary. I noticed that on both the Mojo and Q contents pages the cover story is labelled "Cover Story" so as to separate it from the rest of the features and draw attention to it. I decided to do a similar thing for my contents page, which is why there is a box with "Cover Story" written in it. I used red on black since they were both colours already present on the contents page (which is good for reasons similar to those about not using too many different fonts) and it manages to catch the eye, and that is after all the point of having it. The layout I had begun to instigate is fairly similar to the top left possible layout on my second page of rough contents ideas.

The change here is that I added all the contents page text. As you can see by comparing it with my first page of rough contents ideas, a lot of the things on there were either the same as or adapted from what I had originally planned to write. There were also many things that I had come up with during the production of the front cover, such as Rockability and Leanne Bell, and these I needed to include to retain the continuity between the things on the cover of a magazine and the things on its contents. I moved the "Cover Story" box down so that it was between the page number and Kerry Anne, since I felt that in its previous position it was wasting a line of space and also just looked a bit awkward. I had to erase some of the nice yellow effect around Kerry's hair to make room for the text as I felt that placing the text over it didn't look very good. I then had to arrange each line of text individually to make them fit around the picture.

For this final stage I made only very small changes in a somewhat futile attempt to make the contents page more interesting. I thought that another photo could spice it up a bit, so I placed one where it would not affect the layout too much and where it would be relevant; this photo ended up being of an old man next to "The Good Ol' Days" section. It is relevant and doesn't affect the layout, but despite this still looks pretty bad. I also, as said in the last blog post, desaturated the photo to make it appear older. I tilted it as well to make it more interesting. To make room for the photo I had to Kerry Anne caption to the left of her picture; I actually preferred this to where it was previously as it utilised what was previously empty space.

Main Task - Music Magazine Contents Page First Draft

This is the first draft of my contents page. I feel that there is a lot that needs to be done on this, though to be honest I am not yet sure what. That is why I posted it here on my blog, so that people might be generous enough to post constructive criticisms with ideas about how to make it better.
I shall first talk about the things I do like. I feel that the image of Kerry dominating the bottom left of the page is very effective, and I like how she seems to be looking at the caption about her. I also like how I've made the text wrap around the main image, so that no space is wasted. The final thing I like is the different coloured page numbers, which I did to make it clear that they were separated. The colour used for the page numbers is the same colour I used for some of the text on the cover, and this should help slightly in maintaining a house-style.
Now for what I don't like. Somehow, despite being pretty much completely filled up, the contents page looks quite empty and boring. Perhaps this is because I used too much text and not enough pictures, so for my next draft I might try making the font sizes smaller so I can compress the writing together more. I tried to make the page a bit more interesting by having a picture on the bottom right; I used a picture of a man from my Mum's work as he is old and an old man is relevant to the article "The Good Ol' Days". I desaturated the picture to add to the feeling of oldness. Despite my efforts the contents page still looked boring, but now it was boring with a random old man on it. Something else I don't like is the date and issue number at the top right. I included them to comply with the conventions of all music magazines, but I think that they don't look very good. I considered and experimented with putting some kind of coloured box or circle around them to make them more appealing, but alas, it looked even worse, which is why there is no frame now.
Anyway, criticisms and ideas: throw them at me. Thank you.

My CD Cover Designs

As stated in my last post, I had decided to design some CD covers which I may be able to use on either my contents page or double page spread, or even on a later draft of my front cover. I came up with the three covers posted below which I made in Adobe Photoshop, but before condemning them please consider that I was trying to experiment and I am likely only going to be using one of them, or two at the most.

The first cover I did by using the magic wand tool with different tolerance levels to cut out the girl from the background. I removed the colour from the picture and then applied a rainbow gradient effect at 50%, so that it overlaid the background and the picture of the girl but so that the picture was still clearly visible. The reason for applying these effects was because I named the album "Not Always Black and White", and placing a rainbow colour scheme over a desaturated girl is obviously relevant to such a title.
 
For the second cover I applied some slight lighting effects, but went for a much simpler design overall. I didn't feel that anything would be gained by using snazzy effects, and so left the photo pretty much as it was (though cropped down of course). I used a white font as it mainly went over the girl's black hair and white is clearly visible on black. I used the font Harrington as it looks elegant and sophisticated, and the photo seems more in fitting with this. I noticed from the album covers research that the band/artist name is usually much larger than the album title, and I took this into account and applied it myself.

For the third and final cover I cropped the photo, but then decided the picture looked a bit boring by itself. I began to experiment with the different filters in the Filter Gallery until I found one that made the image look more exciting, but still suitable for an album cover. I eventually found and applied a filter called dark strokes, which made the image darker and blurrier (but in a good way) and gave the image an overall gothic feel. I'm not too happy with the background, font or album title, but this particular cover was meant mainly to test out different image effects. One interesting thing I did do to the text was to position each letter of "DEAD" individually and apply a tilt to each one. I personally quite like the slightly comical effect it gave, but whether it was suitable for the image I'm not too sure.

CD Cover Research

I decided that I would try and make one or two CD album covers to put on either my contents page or double-page spread. I thought it would be an effective way to add more factors to my magazine to emphasise its musical-ness. The following are covers which I collected off the internet and thought to be relevant. I particularly looked at covers showing the faces of females, as most of my photos are of girls' faces.

Magazine Photos - Second Attempt

The following photos are, as one could deduce from the title, my second attempt at taking photos for the music magazine. Like last time I am only including a selection, since there were some that were either extremely similar or extremely bad.
And now, the differences in this set of pictures from the last. Firstly: I used girls. I did this because I had access (bad choice of words) to girls who looked a lot more mature and therefore better suited to be in a band, as opposed to my friends who do just look like teenagers messing about. Also these girls are more attractive than my friends, which means that the potential audience of my magazine will like them more and also I'll have less work to do on Photoshop. Another major thing that I changed was the setting; previously I had gone for the garage band look but this time I used a white background which gave the whole thing a more professional feel. The clothes the girls were wearing were better than before, but still not really perfect. They looked very good and cool individually, but had little coordination all together.

Magazine Photos - First Attempt

Below are photos taken from the first set of pictures I took to possibly include in my magazine. I organised after school one day to gather three of my friends at another friend's house. I asked them to bring their own clothes, ones which would give the impression of them being in a band, and I got them to do a variety of different poses in my friend's garage. In the first few pictures everyone is still wearing their suits, as I thought it would be interesting to experiment with more than one set of costumes. In some shots they are holding/using instruments, in others not.
Overall these pictures didn't turn out all that well, though that should be forgiven as this was my first try. The main reason for my failure is probably the setting, since a garage (despite the popularity of garage bands) is probably not the best place to take photos for a professional music magazine. Another problem is likely that that friends I used didn't look enough like they were in a band. One of them (Jonny - the boy with glasses and a hat) looked actually quite suited to be a musician; the other two did not. Also a problem was that their clothes weren't really coordinated enough, so even if each of them looked like rock stars they wouldn't have looked like they were in a group. I tried to take all these factors on board and improve on them when taking my next set of photos.
Also, please forgive the somewhat deranged layout of the photos; Blogger makes it exceedingly difficult to post multiple pictures in any sort of sensible order.