Evaluation Question 1

For my front cover, I tried to adhere to layout conventions so that potential readers would acknowledge it as being similiar to magazines they were used to. Being unique is all well and good, but people tend to avoid things that are radically different. I placed the masthead at the top, and the date and price above that, because these convey crucial information about the magazine. Below that, I divided my cover up according to the rule of thirds, placing my photo in the right two thirds, and cover lines for the magazine's other key acts in the left third. I then placed the main cover line in the centre of the page, just below the maain image. At the bottom, I placed the barcode and a list of the rest of the acts inside. If someone had read far enough down the front page to show an interest in the magazine, they might be interested in these other acts. In order to make my magazine stand out, and also to direct attention away from the poor-quality photograph, I had to defy convention. The photo doesn't cover up the entire cover, instead being framed by the chevrons. These chevrons also from the colour scheme, which differs from most standard magazine colour schemes. Instead of using white as a primary colour, it uses black, combined with green and yellow. I beleive this gives my magazine a greater presence than others and will help it stand out when put on sale. Probably the largest break from tradition was the obscuring of my cover image's face. The smiley face serves numerous purposes. First, it obscures the bad photography, as previously mentioned. Secondly, it matches up with the genre of my magazine, being a pastiche of Daft Punk. Thirdly, it adds to the bold colour scheme by being bright and striking. The fact that it matches the yellow is just a bonus.

I wanted to make my contents page easily readable, which meant following established conventions. In fact, the layout is almost directly inspired by Q magazine, albeit simplified. Divide the magazine in half, then quarters. The editorial goes in the top left quarter, and the cover article in the top right. The lower half is devoted to the article list. For easy reference, the features are in one column and regular articles are in the other. In terms of colour, the colour scheme for the front cover is retained; this is also following convention. Using the same colour scheme will allow people to gain familiarity with my magazine.

For the main article, I decided to abandon established convention and make something that captured the spirit of the genre of music and the act featured in the article. I would have to do this without exposing my audience too much to the poor quality photographs, while still using four of them. To do this, I divided my article into grids. While this is an established convention, my grids wnet diagonally, which gave it a skewed, stylised appearance. This helped to disguise the quality of the photographs by tiliting them. To draw attention to the smiley face that is my headline act's emblem of a sort, I used multiple copies of it as the background, thereby creating a coherent theme for the article. In order to create a coherent colour scheme, I used two different colour lines for the grids, then used these same colours for the interview text. Alternating between one colour for the act and another for the interviewer also made it easier to read the article.