Front cover journey...

I did my first photo shot for my music magazine front cover, dps and contents page like couple of weeks ago.

(Image used for the front cover)

All of these images represent my target audience and the genre of the magazine. Most of the electronic dance music magazines have just a guy (or a girl) on the front cover with no musical props or anything, more looking like a model. That is why I have chosen the man (attracting females audience, also much more Dj's are males which is a connotation of my genre as well). 

This photo shot was made in pretty bad lightning, home environment and it does not look as professional as I want it to look. Always tried to used mid close-up or a close-up for my images. 

I have decided that these images are not suitable for my real magazine front cover, but it is a good lesson for me. I also will use some of them on my double page spread and my contents page. Especially images where the character is smoking is a connotation of the electronic dance music. 

The best example of this is the article about well known electronic music dj written on 'Mixmag' online site : 

The image they used is a very strong connotation of the dark side of the music, as the image is dark and the smokes in the background, you can see that the character is wearing headphones to connote about the music (that is why I used headphones in my photo shot) but it is clear that an image like that cannot be used on the front cover. 

I wanted my front cover to be pretty dark but have like a fading effect from black(or dark blue) to white. (Just like an image on the website above). So I cut my character out of the original image and put him on the background. 

It looked like this : 

Then I designed the masthead myself (drew it) and tried to put it on the image. My original masthead looked like this :

It should not be black and white, and the lines are not perfectly straight but I just wanted a rough idea how it would look. It will be corrected for sure. The line underneath has to be much longer to go through the whole image as well. I have chosen to make the masthead myself because I had my own idea and online sites are quite limited when I know exactly what I want.

So even though my image was not perfectly corrected at the time, I put the masthead on it, to have a rough idea how does it look. 

Now when I see how it looks, I know I do not like the way image looks so unreal and not 'in depth'. You can clearly see that it is just put on the image, it does not look real, also the arm which goes in inside the image looks like it is not cut properly. The blue shirt and the blue background is not the best idea either. The character blends in and the only thing that catches our eyes is the red lead which goes from the earphones. Also we cannot see character's hands, it looks unreal. 

So I decided to re-do my photo shot. This time using the studio to create the real fading background working with lights and constantly changing my character's pose to find the best one and the most applicable for my type of music magazine. 

I will try to experiment with my background making two different ones : very dark one with model wearing something very light and then the opposite, white background bleaching to light grey and model wearing black clothes.

Serious face is a 'MUST' thing for my magazine front cover as well. The only one 'prop' will be used is headphones or a computer (computer will not be seen on the front cover).

What is a magazine?..

The first thing that comes to my mind is pieces of paper which provides some kind of information depending on what type of target audience it has to represent.

In media terms a magazine is a media text, media product that gives us certain type of information depending on genre, niche market (specific type of people that the product is targeted to), but then the other question which needs to be answered - how do we know what type of genre is certain magazine, what type of audience it is linked to?#

Every media product has its own codes and conventions. Conventions is what the target audience expect to see or hear of that particular type of media text. Mostly every type, or genre magazine has its own ways of representing what is in the magazine. Also genre conventions easily tells us a lot about target audience, even if you (personally) do not belong to it. People stereotype certain things and this lets us understand target audience. Also the magazine itself has some of other media types inside of it, like advertisements, might also have small parts of diaries, stories (interviews) or social media (posts from 'Facebook' included in a paper magazine, to make it more and more modern and to make a target audience much wider. Some people might not like to read a magazine in paper but they would love to read it online. Or maybe some of them likes reading just short stories and they could do it on 'Facebook'.)

For example a magazine with bright colours, mostly pink, light blue and white connotes about female audience. The main image shows the age group of the magazine target audience. Mostly women who read this magazine wants to look like the main image model. Young women from the age of 18 to about 35. 

I have chosen German 'Cosmopolitan' which means I cannot understand the language but media lets me 'read' it from the front cover. 

Model is looking straight into a camera, which is called direct address in media terms. 

The magazine front cover is not overloaded with lots of sell lines or sub stories. It does not have a skyline, any puffs. 

It is quite minimized, but it has the main things like masthead, main image which is not the mid-shot (which connotes us about a genre of magazine, as long as it is a fashion magazine, front cover is already selling clothes, make-up, hairstyle)

Names of sub stories are written in a bigger font to attract attention, also using just one word means it is a very strong word which will catch our target audience eyes straight away. 

Also every magazine has its own USP (unique selling point), usually for fashion magazines it is a model which is used on the main image. This image is the most important thing in magazine, it sells the magazine.

BUT


A magazine not necessarily means a paper magazine. Media goes bigger and bigger every day, now we also have internet magazines. An opportunity to read the magazine online as much as offline just makes the niche market a bit bigger.