Evaluation: Working with existing forms and conventions-Reworking the Familiar

In the early stages of developing both my college magazine and my music magazine, I knew that before commencing any major construction upon such work, intensive research would have to be prioritised in order to carry out a professional approach to both magazines. By looking at highly marked school magazine projects and existing genre related magazines which to a degree focus on specifics such as electronic indie, e.g. Clash Magazine, I could take away a degree of knowledge concerning what audience I would be targeting when producing graphic and literal design such as front pages, content pages, and double page spreads. I did this by concentrating primarily on the age of the models used, range of colours, fonts and to what extent creative tools are implicated upon specific features and areas. By looking over such key construction areas, I could already put together an early image of my ideal reader and how they would approach my created work. Ideally, I believe this was pivotal to my understanding of how to construct an audience specific magazine, and more so I feel such research affected to great extent the approach I would later take to both my preliminary and main task.

More then this however, I made it my objective in relation to my research to look at magazines irrelevant to my selected format of both college and music magazine, such as Heat or Classic FM. By looking at either of these, I knew primarily how NOT to set out my magazine, being which a pivotal list of do’s and don’ts concerning fonts, colours and layout. Although these may be considered obvious, I had unaware to myself already made simple mistakes when designing my Film College magazine; meaning I could not afford to over look such factors when arriving at my main, final task. It became common knowledge to steer clear of an over use of whites, times new roman, and the occasional italic.

I finally put to work my overview of existing forms and conventions and utilized a professional perspective to the work I undertook. This became pivotal to how I would criticize aspects of the construction of my work and what elements I would see fit to edit. It became obvious to me that a contemporized format of photography heavy in “money shots” would perfectly fit the criteria of my magazine. Such images would be relevantly striking, engaging and above all enticing, prioritizing capturing the attention of my ever so aware target audience (16-30). A blend of low angle shots and tight close ups seemed to utilize such categorization these magazines affectively displayed.

To successfully align with both the graphic template I had in mind and the use of such design in related music magazines, I made it important to blend these combinations of colour palettes and backgrounds to great extent. For instance, striking blue and white electric sparks would be affective up-against a vivid backdrop of black (much alike to how magazines confined in heavy uses of whites in double page spreads and content pages, I reversed this and used this primarily on my front page).

In almost all areas in the construction of my magazine/s, research aided greatly to maintain an industry standard perspective to both the outcome of graphic design, literacy, and justification of images and other aspects in relation to my ideal reader.