Starting My Prelim

In order to create the best music magazine possible, I needed to practise using Photoshop and designing magazines so I created a Prelim task- to design a school magazine. I carried out some reasearch into school magazines, by looking at other magazines and creating brainstorms, collages of images and listing all my ideas. From here, I created my magazine from an images I took around the school. It gave me a great insight into using the software, and now I am ready to create my music magazine.

Evaluations of Websites

To gain a good understanding of magazine house styles, I carried out an evaluation on the sites. I chose to evaluate two magazine websites in which follow the theme of my magazine- clubbing, djing and dance. My first magazine is 'Mixmag', which a very popular music and dance magazine. This is the type of magazine I want to create and evaluating the site gave me lots of ideas towards my house style. The next website I evaluated was 'RWD' which I thought was also a very good site- even though thier magazine layout did not impress me. I got many ideas for my magazine from these sites.

The Next Steps, Evaluating 'Q' Magazine

The first step to creating our magazine, was to investigate the different key terms of a magazine that an editor may use. We learnt all about house styles, mastheads, straplines, the use of photography and pictures, headlines, cover stories and many more, and also the importance of all of these aspects. After we investigated the different terms, we all brought a music magazine to evaluate. I chose 'Q' magazine, which is a very popular music magazine. I evaluated the front page, and also a double page spread from inside the magazine. The purpose of this task was to look at the house style, and see what looked good and what did'nt look so great. This task really helped me to get a good idea of what my magazine should look like.

Introduction to Media

In the first lesson, we gained an understanding of Media, and how it effects us in our everyday lives. A very important aspect of Media, is magazines and newspapers. This is what we will be studying in AS Media.

We will have to create a music magazine front cover and also a double page spread. To do this, we will look at other magazines and articles and evalute them, learn key terms used in Media and magazines, and also other reaserch and ideas in which we may use within our magazine. We will also create a pliminiary task, a magazine for our school, to get us used to creating magazines and developing our skills.