Front cover draft/layout self critique

after coming across some ideas, due to lack of time and being unable to learn photoshop well enough in order to reach better quality for the magazine, and pretty much just grabbing a lot of ideas I already had and bringing them together in order to create something rather different and at the time considering the amount of preparation taken for this magazine, it was.. just about passable, but not even close to what I thought I was capable, but on the bright side of things I realised how.. mediocre it was within itself to the point where at the end after thinking about it I was disappointed a lot in myself with what it was, although even after recieving some positive feedback about the positioning of the pictures and text on the interview page, and some of the initial ideas for the front cover. The contents was very conventional, which I didnt like, bugged me quite a bit, coming to the conclusion I NEEDED another model in order to re-do the interview pages and probably add a few more things to the contents in order to reach some ideas I had gained from looking at a kerrang magazine, which had also inspired the last minute masthead which I wish to keep, anyway enough sidetracking on the layouts for the magazine here the first drafts are:

The front cover, the only few points of this I found that I actually personally enjoyed to like and found pleasing towards my eye and others who had a look at it. But the one thing that everyone had to say, and I had agreed with totally, was infact the colours I used, Blue and Orange.. Now blue I understood slightly why people may have understood it to be such as "unfriendliness". On the other hand, the orange complimented the blue and gave the image that orange was somewhat to do with fun, which is a primary element within a party, since when you go to a party you obviously intend to go and have fun, otherwise there's no point going at all if you wish to just sit in the corner and watch and neither socialise realistically. Plus there was no issue date e.g. February 2010 or price for the magazine.

the blueprint for frontpage, contents + interview

These were the important ideas i felt that had to be connoted from the magazine within itself in order to access and catch the readers eye and draw them in by looking at the front page, and these elements to be spread out within or throughout the pages:

Researching slogan for magazine

Now as quite a few magazines such as Kerrang! have their own slogans, I personally felt that a slogan was quite important and defined the magazine and its contents a lot more than who or what artist/band was within the magazine. And above that, the majority of the time the slogans are not included among the front page of the magazine, hence I want to be a bit more unconventional and include it over the front page. Now, I had to relate this to the title of my magazine and the genres which it is based upon. I chose to use "Cause We Like To Party All The Time" purely since it worked well with the name of the magazine "Rave" seeing as Rave is a party, and the magazine is pretty much a regular on clubs plus music which works with it, hence leaving me with that as the slogan.

Naming the magazine

Well originally as I had come to terms with changing the genre to dubstep, drum & bass etc.. I realised that all these genres went quite hand it hand with a lot of others.. and made me think.. it's all the same in a way but only specific sub-genres can be related to my primary genres, Dubstep and Drum & Bass which go hand in hand anyway. This led to my conclusion of expanding the genres of my magazine once again but only to a point where it simply touches the elements which are related to my genres, nothing else. So i began with thoughts on the idea of the genres which contains the elements of more mainstream genres such as: Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Bassline, Funkyhouse, Grime, Jungle, Garage, Dance, Electro, Dancehall, Reggae, Alternative Hip Hop and Alternative Rock. Now when originally deciding a genre I wished to base the magazine upon, I had thought of it simply as.. what links all of these genres together, Coming up with the plan of devising what they as a whole connoted. I ended up unable to think of a link between them straight away, BUT! thanks to a Rave I went to, I just thought.. that they all came together at one particular event as mash-ups or remixes and the original music leaving it at the conclusion, I was going to title it "RAVE!".

Contents pages

From looking at the contents page from mixmag, I recall seeing a box at the bottom featuring a free cd related to the music which was within the magazine, which made me look at it and think a bit and even got me quite interested in just the contents and above all of this, it wasn't common within many magazines to have that type of review at the bottom of the contents page.. So i got together a photo of my model(see below)

the model before

I made some edits to this and turned it into one new photo..


ALTHOUGH, i'd like to add this photo was originally as part of me learning photoshop but whilst I was doing this I was also uploadingthe contents page research at the time.. and add 1 and 1 together.. we have a new addition towards the magazine.

contents page moodboard

I had a look at some other contents pages for peace of mind that I wasnt relying totally on the mixmag and Q contents pages. From these I got a few more ideas for my contents page, and allowed me to try mix it up a little when it came to my contents page.

Interview Research

After looking through some magazines in a lesson, we were assigned to choose an interview of our choice and have a look, and learn and see conventions of interviews within magazines. I chose an interview of Kate Nash, and depicted that I had to first understand the introductory photo to the magazine, by looking and seeing how the masthead for the interview connoted and denoted what was part of the mis-en-scene and how it may have related to the artist in particular.


Now from this I learnt that interviews had to be structured as either embedded or simple Q&A, both would work BUT varied depended on the TA(target audience) who I'm trying to reach out to, which is 18-25 year olds(my reader profile has yet to be uploaded). As the interview was embedded, and my interview which i had taken was in a Q&A format, but had a lot of potential in my opinion to be embedded and turnt into one which reached the standards of language for such an age group, but also being able to reach out to them in a casual tone. For now, i'm leaving my interview un-embedded so that I can simply turn this version of my magazine into a draft, and get a better insight on how I should structure the magazine.