Analysis of a double page music magazine artical

I looked at a music magazine called NME. The double page spread was about the new band, pulled apart by horses, drunken dare to get a tattoo of their record dealer face.

The title of the article was a mustard yellow which gave you the feeling of hot, burning foods. It said "TAT'S ENTERTAINMENT" this is a play on words from that's entertainment, because this article is about tattoos. This is effective as it makes your feel clever because you have worked it out so you want to read more. Saying that a dare has got "terribly out of hands" makes you interested in what is going to happen, you think its dangerous or someone has ended up in hospital so you read on.

The language of this article is informal which suits the audience reading it. Also it includes some swearing and reference to man anatomy in it. I think that the amount used and how it is used is effective and not embarrassing to read.

The first paragraph is important as if it does not interest the reader they will stop reading. This article got my attention start away by comparing the new band to really famous people such as Ozzy Osbourne. They introduce the subject about dares by talking about other famous peoples' dares, this is interesting and you want to read on to find out just how crazy this dare is.

The attitudes of this band are obvious as you read on, they don't seem to care if they get hurt, they just want to have fun. They say that the bandmates describe his attitude as "do or die". This makes me feel like I know them better and the fact they are daring makes me interested to find out more about them and what they do.

After I looked at this artical and had made my jugement on what I thought this band was like, I went onto the internet and watched one of their music videos. My opinion of this band from their artical was correct as the video was just like I had guessed it would be.

The cover and contents page

We had to decide what was going to be on our cover, so my partner and I sat down and decided on these main points:

• Use the new medium close up photo as the background.
• Put more text on the cover, articles and lures.
• To keep the masthead as we liked the font and thought it stood out.
• Put the three different school logos on the cover to show who it is targeted at.
• Put the price on so they know how much it is.

Here is our finial cover:

The contents page needed to be simple to read but look interesting. It had to have the main articles on it as the articles that are in the magazine every week are known by the readers so do not need to be on the contents page. My partner and I worked on the contents page and this is the final version we came up with:

Change of photo

As we stared to make our cover we looked back on the brief and realised that we had been told that our picture had to be of a student in a medium close up shot, which ours was not. We then had to crop our photo which now did not fit the background so added another above it. This is then what our magazine looked like:

We did not like this cover but had to present it to our class as there was no more time to edit it. This is some of the feed back we got:

• Having two images was bad as you do not know which to look at and your eyes should be drawn to one thing.
• The mast head should not cover the persons head as this looks untidy.
• It is not obvious who the target audience is from this cover.
• There is no articles or features to make you want to pick up this magazine.

We agreed with all of the points so decided to start the cover again. This time we did not disagree with each other on as many things so we were able to make the cover quickly.

Our photo is again a simple photo, but we think that this makes it stand out more, and with the grey background the girl is the first thing you look at. This is the photo was used:

We cropped our photo to fit the cover but found the top did not reach the top of the page, we did not want to stretch the image so we cut a part of the background and copied it to place on above the photo to fill the space.

The photo for the front cover.

Deciding which photo to use was very hard as my partner and I disagreed at first. We had taken quite a few photos but was able to take some of them out straight away as they just didn’t work. This was one of the photos we felt wouldn’t work for the cover:

But as we narrowed them down I wanted different ones from my partner. In the end we decided on this photo as it was simple but stood out. Also the layout of the people in the photo will make it easier to put writing around the outside.

Once we had chosen our photo we cropped it to fit to the shape we wanted. Then we used a tool to change the colours and contrast of the photo. We thought the reddish tint gave a warm feeling to the picture. This is the final version: