Main Task Proposal Table - Stage 2

I created another proposal table to propose my idea for a music magazine which I plan to create. Unlike the previous proposal table, I have documented my ideas in more detail and in more depth than before.

Describe your idea for the brief: For this task, I will design a music magazine that is called ‘Soundcheck’, which relates to the term in which an artist rehearses their music before a live event or show. This is usually the time where an artist’s sound is not perfected yet, and they are getting used to the stage and atmosphere itself. This relates to the theme of the magazine, which aims to present new and upcoming artists who will soon become ‘seen’ by lots of music fans, allowing the magazine to have a niche by presenting new and upcoming artists. For my main article, I plan to hold an interview-type article about a new and upcoming artist on a double-page spread.

Genre/ sub genre: list similar texts which have inspired your thoughts: The genre of the magazine is primarily rock and alternative music. Taking inspiration from publications such as ‘NME’, ‘Q’ and ‘Spin’, my music magazine will feature traditional, casual style of article writing, with the way the articles are written being both informal and serious at the same time. Obviously, this is hard to achieve during an interview-style article. Captions under the article images are also a good way to add informality and humour to the magazine, while the article delivers the often serious and more formal text.

Target audience: gender/ age/ characteristics/ behaviour: For the target audience, I will aim my magazine towards a teen – adult demographic. The magazine will not be gender-specific due to the fact that music is not gender-specific either, and people of both sexes can enjoy music. Because of this unisex target audience, the colour scheme will need to be created to coincide with this impartiality. I have seen colour schemes in previous magazines such as Q or NME (which are both aimed at no specific gender of people) use a white/black/red colour scheme. None of these colours have any connotations with gender, and yet are still able to make the magazine look overall more appealing and stand out.

Major conventions I will use: In my magazine, I hope to utilise some of the major conventions that are present in previous magazines that I have researched for my own magazine. On the main cover, I will include a masthead (positioned in the top-left corner of the main cover), sell lines (including a main sell line), small descriptions which give extra detail about each of these sell lines, as well as necessary information such as a barcode, issue number and issue date. The one other convention that I will include is a main image, hopefully taking up a majority of the page like in past publications. For the contents page, I will include pictures, equipped with small numbers which link the pictures on the contents page to the page number which features the corresponding article. Finally, for the double-page spread, I will use a large, main image on one of the pages. On the other page, I will feature the article text, which will follow conventions by being written in a regular, easy-to-read font such as Arial or Times New Roman. Pull quotes and straplines are also widely used amongst many publications and so I may include them in my publication.

Conventions I may subvert/ change/ not use: Having the necessary information on the contents page does not seem necessary, as the reader has already picked up the magazine, and so will already be familiar with the issue number and date when they pick up the magazine. Having the necessary information on the main cover is good enough to warrant it’s absence on the contents. Because the theme of the article (an interview), I do not believe that a drop cap would be necessary.

Original images: what/ where/ what: On the main cover, I will have a large, prominent image of a subject, possibly with their faces covered by a black bar, which will then hold the main sell line. This will be used due to the fact that the artist is unknown. Inside, I will use images of different artists for the contents page, however will use different images of the artist featured on the main cover to represent him on the article page – this is due to the fact that when researching other student’s work, I found many had repeated the same image multiple times throughout the entire magazine, which gave an overall repetitive and unprofessional result.

Potential difficulties/ Plan B: During the creation of the magazine, I may face many difficulties during the creation of the magazine. One of the main difficulties that I may face is the image quality. When looking at previous student’s existing work, I noticed that very few of the images were of professional quality. I must ensure that images I take are of a high quality, and can be stretched and manipulated and still maintain the quality that is desired of them to appear of a professional standard. Getting the colour scheme right is also something that I may find particularly difficult. It appears difficult to get the colour scheme exactly right, and using too much of one colour and not enough of another colour is a minor detail which is the border between an amateur publication and a professional-looking publication. Many professional-quality publications have colour schemes that you do not notice in the grand scheme of things, yet amateur ones feature colours that are instantly noticeable to the reader. Because of this, I will try and utilise the colours on the page so that it is not noticeable, yet still has a strong impact on the reader.