Skills Development Essay

For my Foundation Portfolio I created a front cover, contents page, and double page spread of a music magazine of my choice, I had to choose the genre and also the individual who would be used on my magazine. All of the images and text used had to be original, produced by myself, which included a minimum of four images. I chose to create my music magazine within the genre of pop. Also for my preliminary exercise I needed to produce, using desktop publishing and an image manipulation program, the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead, this preliminary exercise was to help us develop skills in Adobe Photoshop CS5.

Research & Planning, Genre Conventions
I researched the elements needed for my brief by analysing existing (e.g. NME, Kerrang and Q) music magazines and the conventions they have used and to what effect. I later analysed the genre of Pop by looking at their more successful artists and an already existing magazine. I looked specifically at NME magazine, although it did not have the same target audience I was looking for, it is a hugely popular magazine with the look of what I wanted. For example, when creating my contents page I used the same layout as NME, however, for the front cover I chose to use the style of Q, using a lot of emphasis on the artist. Some of the genre conventions for a pop magazine are that the artist used on the front cover must be the person most involved in this issue. On their picture it must state in bold writing who they are and a quote from the article to bring their audience in. The quote would be to do with their own personal life; something that the audience could relate to in order for them to want to read on. Another genre convention I found was on the contents page, this convention was not just specific to pop but to all music magazines; in that the numbers on the contents page did not have to be in order, they could just focus on the key pages that the reader may be interested in, rather than listing 1-100 chronologically. The source of this research was mainly the internet, but also some magazine hard copies. I used the internet to find magazine front covers from a magazine, genre and year of my choice. The LIIAR acronym (language, institution, ideology, audience and representation) helped to shape my analysis.

Creative Work
As part of the creative process I identified the typical conventions of a music magazine. I explored different ways of setting out the conventions across a layout and also considered the conventions of pop, my chosen music genre. The practice that I'd had whilst making my college magazine helped me to know what conventions to use and also to know what looked good on a front cover. I used an off white background on Photoshop and toyed different fonts, pictures and shape to see what fit well on the screen. I took a series of photos when planning my final piece using both different poses and different models seeing which would best fit the genre of my magazine. Once I was in the final stages of production I gave my audience my front cover, contents page and double page spread along with some questions about my project and what sort of audience they think it is aimed at. My results assured me that I had made the right decisions when taking my target audience into account as all those asked knew it was a pop music magazine.

Digital Technology/Post-Production
In my foundation portfolio I used Adobe Photoshop CS5 in order to manipulate my photos to have the desired effect and make the publication look more professional. I had never used Adobe Photoshop before so I had to do many drafts in order to get it right. Adobe Photoshop CS5 allowed to edit my digital photos to a degree which I was happy with, but my main technical challenge was learning which tools to use to create which effect whilst also creating a photo which would allow for the typical conventions of a music magazine such as a masthead, main feature headline, dateline, barcode, issue no, skyline and subtitle. In order to achieve a professional looking magazine along with all the typical conventions I took photos and then tested them out on Photoshop by adding all the elements and seeing if it worked. Following this I would take some more photos with the layout of a typical magazine in mind in order to achieve the desired result. By creating a magazine front cover with all the typical conventions I was able to communicate to the audience that publication was a professional one, i.e. something worth buying. As for the creation of the double page spread, I used Microsoft Publisher 2010 in order to create the effect of a typical publication. When working on Microsoft Publisher you can add effects to key quotes that you cannot do using Photoshop CS5, I tried out many different fonts and also styles of writing a double page spread as prior to this I had no experience of writing an article which led me to using an interview style article.