Evaluation of College Magazine

By Dan Briston

How did you use your time?

I think I could have devoted more time to the magazine. I didn’t have to shoot any additional photos of the band I used, because those I already had from a gig were perfect for the magazine, so this left a lot of time free. I think the time used to develop the magazine on Quark Express was well spent, but I could have finished earlier and had more time for reflection and blog/scrapbook updates. For the development of the magazine I have shown, I could have tried harder because the approach I took looks like I had blinkers on when I did it. It was very close-minded and I only had my own ideas. I didn’t provide great reasons for choosing black and white and showed no particular influence as to why I didn’t do colour or try alternatives. Such as different styles and conventions.

What was the project about?

The project was to create a music magazine of one cover page, one contents page and a double page spread whose content had to relate to the cover image. The magazine had to contain at least 4 self generated images and no found imagery was allowed, because of plagiarism. A feature article also was necessary. The photos could have been of a real or ‘made-up’ band and I chose my friend’s band ‘Bridges’ from Heacham to take photos of.

What research did you do?

I chose to look at the styles of many different skateboarding magazines from around the world. The skate magazines often have unconventional styles and innovative ways of capturing audiences. Grey Skate Mag (greyskatemag.com) is an online magazine but release few copies into the big cities of the UK. It’s called grey because the majority of its images are shot in black and white. Any of its photographers use old film cameras and high ISO films to achieve high contrast, dramatic photographs. The magazine is very much concentrated on its imageryIts unique selling point is the pink ‘FREE’ graphic in the eyeline, even though it obviously doesn’t have to sell.

What research did you do?

• Sidewalk Magazine is a worldwide skateboarding magazine that is extremely colourful compared to the last magazine. It has been longer established and has a large readership. This magazine is quite unconventional in the way that uses a masthead that stretches all the way across the page, more like a newspaper and the cover operates in a framework that is white. The masthead and cover lines are often fairly close together, if not, the cover lines are close to the subject. The cover image is always very large and eye-catching. The colours of text are nearly always matched or similar, likely by using the eyedropper tool in photoshop.

What research did you do?

• For the photographs I took, I gained a lot of influence from a live music photographer called Roman Laris who specialises in very intense hardcore/metal gigs and always shoots in black and white. His photos of the band ‘Dead Swans’ were my main object to aspire to, because of his ability to capture the intensity of the crowds and band.

Influences

I looked at a lot of the different blogs on the OCR media website (after searching OCR media blogs on Google). I have to admit that many of them were very impressive but the style I wanted my project to be in was dissimilar to most of them. The cover of the magazine from ‘really good magazine blog’ was the most interesting, as the photo the candidate had used was very well done and suited the cover, however I believed that my magazine needed to be kept simple and emulate a more traditional style so I denied this blog. The magazine’s colours and fonts seems to appeal to the ‘emo’ culture, whereas I wanted my magazine not to belong to a particular scene and be read my a very wide audience.

Referring to the textbook• Conception – I did not conceive the images I chose to use. They

were not planned either, they were purely luck that I shot them correctly, as many live band photos are.

• Mock-ups – I did create one mockup of the magazine which determined the image I was going to use, instead of choosing one image for definite.

• Mise en Scene – I tried to create a very open atmosphere in the cover image. The photo fills a lot of the cover, but the space in the background is largely black, making the place look large and in turn, the magazine look bigger. It does look like the room is filled with a substance, such as smoke, which creates more of a ‘live music’ feel – which adds to the theme of keeping live music real also.

Peer FeedbackAll the feedback here was achieved by posting on Facebook and copying the comments into here.• Layla Holland: I really like the use of lighting, it creates a good atmosphere to the photography, I

also like the effect used on the photo as it makes the space look smoky and 'stage like‘. The use of layering is very good with the titles and names. The only comment I could make on improvements is there is a small area of dead space in the left hand corner, but other than that I think its really good :)

• Emily Witley: There is no price or date on it! There is no bright/ eye catching colours to attract the reader or that there is no eye contact with the focal image then you can just say its cause its an independent music magazine, people are more likely to go looking for the magazine specifically rather than being attracted to it.

• Elly Carpenter: The front cover’s really eye catching. The words really stand out and its not too overloaded. I like the contents with the same b/w theme but using more grey so differing. It’s slightly hard to read the end of the futures bit... but otherwise really good :)

• Jack Warburton: is it about realism? as there's little things like a bar code etc. missing, other than that, massive fan.

• Jake Armstrong: The front cover is great. Apart from that personally, I would make the title of the magazine stand out from the other text. Like it should be a logo title rather than in the same font and a size bigger. You get me? The contents is awesome colour wise but its a bit hard to read some of the words but overall, it’s sweet.

• Joe Clark: Looks good. Content's page is a bit like "woahh" maybe tone down the images and use a rounder font for the bulk?

Target Audience

My target audience was aimed to be as general as it could be. The bands I chose to write of on the feature lines are very mixed and one would normally find some in ‘Kerrang’ and some in ‘NME’ which are starkly different magazines. I didn’t want it to appeal to a specific cultural sect, but I didn’t want specifics to dislike it either. I think the grayscale them eliminates a lot of bias in a cultural way. In terms of age it is aimed at between 15 and 30, however there are bands that I know older people would be into. It is not intended to be gender specific either, as in a genera; way there is equal interest in the genres of music I have covered in the magazine.

Reasons why…• Black and White theme:

I chose to do the entire project in black and white predominantly because of cost. Colour inks cost a large amount (~10x at college), so printing at college was expensive. Also, for a company it would cost a fortune so I faced the project with more like a newspaper’s aspect. I have always preferred monochrome anyway, as I feel it communicates more feeling in a photo. It leaves the viewer to fill in the gaps that a colour photo might already have. I think it’s photography for intellectuals.

• Serif fonts:I prefer the credibility of a serif font. It demands respect and it feels string and unquestionable, which fits perfectly to the name of the mag.

• The Name:I chose ‘Priority’ because it connotes that it is the best in the range and that it should be on the top of everyone’s list, the first for magazines covering the music industry.

• The Cover Image:I chose to use this particular images because of its unconventional style. The subject is not looking at the camera, for a start and also the subject’s hair blends into the background. Another reason I chose it is because the only other logical photo would have looked wrong and not operated successfully next to the masthead.

Software and ProblemsQuark:I encountered quite a few problems with the Quark software, especially when

transferring work from Mac to PC. I always saved my works as ‘Page As Layout’ and a Quark version 8 file, which was compatible with both my home download and the college Mac computers, however, when working in the tower studios newsroom, the Quark version 7 was installed so I couldn’t open my files there.

Another problem I encountered was with fonts. I was intent on using the font ‘Trajan Pro’ that was available on the Mac computers and Photoshop on my PC, but not on the college PCs, so every time I opened a document where I had used ‘Trajan Pro’, it had to alter the preferences and change to a font that was similar. A lot of the time, this font did not fit into the space I had already used and had to change the tracking to fit again. In the end, I almost completely re-touched all the fonts on the Macs and did not use PC again.

More Influences

As I already stated, I drew a lot of influence from international skate magazine. In addition to those I noted (Sidewalk and Grey) I also read Kingpin and Thrasher, a European and an American skate magazine. The differences between styles are stark, as Thrasher is very bold and bright, outlandish and sometimes garish, in a typically American way, where Kingpin is quite subtle and its design is almost architectural, a lot of the time they use architecture from the cover image to implement their cover lines or create another point of attention, which I favour. With kingpin, it’s all about the cover image. With Thrasher, everything is implemented to create as eye-catching a cover as possible