Friday 10th- 24th October 2008

Friday 10th- 13th October

I designed my front cover and contents pages and came up with the mise-en-scene of all of the pictures and layout that would relate to each article.
Then I went round school taking pictures to use on the front cover and contents pages of my magazine, here are the pictures I produced, before I cropped, resized or reduced the opacity on them.


Tuesday 14th October

Our teacher introduced us to the programme Quark Xpress. Quark Xpress is predominantly used for desk top publishing by magazine companies because it is quick and easy to use which helps them to meet their tight deadlines.
Our teacher showed us some of the main tools that will help to produce our contents pages, we then experimented using all the tools so that we became familiar with the software, before we began producing our final products.

Wednesday 15th October

Today I uploaded my main image onto the computer. I then used Adobe Photoshop to cut around my main image for my front cover using the lasso tool because I was unhappy with the backdrop behind my subject.

Thursday 16th October

I worked on the layout for my front cover today by adding the title of the magazine, the cover lines, the price sticker and the bar code. I followed the list of codes and conventions that I had made previously in another lesson to help me.

Friday 17th October

I made adjustments to my front cover because the colour scheme didn’t make it stand out and I didn’t have enough cover lines so it made the front cover look bare. I improved it by adding more cover lines and I used one of my images which linked with the main image as the background, but I changed the opacity so that it was slightly transparent and didn’t draw attention away from my main image and the coverlines. After that I began working on my contents page.

Monday 20th October

I made my contents page look more attractive by changing the fonts so that the key words were bigger and bolder and I also added page numbers to link the images to the content.

Tuesday 21st October


Today I made the final touches to my front cover and contents pages for the preliminary exercise. I also started my evaluation.
Here are the finished products.




Thursday 23rd October

Today we discussed the connotations of each colour.
We made a list of what each colour meant to us, here is what we came up with:
Red: - anger, passion, love, lust, danger, stop, heat, fire, violence, blood, heart, roses, hell, the devil, murder.
Blue: - calm, sad, peaceful, cold, sea, sky, ice, ink, tranquillity, tears, water, depression.
Green: - nature, go, fresh, mint, land, summer, grass, illness, infection, countryside, recycling, environment, healthy, envy.
White: - pure, virginity, marriage, clinical, clean, snow, Heaven, peace, sterile, emptiness, cold, angels, light, death.
Black: - death, Halloween, Emo music, Mosher, bats, metal music, dark, depressed, evil, Goth, spiders, storm, funeral, stress, alone, seductive, sexy, mourning, grief.
We found that there were contradictions within each group for example red can signify violence and murder but it also has connotations of love and passion. This is because a colour takes on a particular meaning which depends on the context in which it is used and colours also mean different things in each culture. For example in our culture the colour green when used on a media product symbolises to us that the product is eco-friendly or it has something to do with the environment, recycling or being healthy.
This research was to help us when making choices for the colour schemes and to justify why we have used each colour.
Also in this lesson we looked at symbols and what they could represent.

Friday 24th October

The main theme of today’s lesson was the word ‘signify’ which linked back with the work from yesterday’s lesson.
We learnt about Ferdinand De Saussure the Swiss linguist who was the founder of the semiotic theory. His theory stated that sign= signifier + signified whereby the ‘signifier’ is the physical appearance of the sign for example; a cross is two lines that intersect one another and the ‘signified’ is the mental concept behind it, in this case the cross means wrong or kiss.
Our teacher then asked us to draw a tree in 5 seconds. Most of us came up with the same simple image which shows that we had a shared frame of reference and helped us to understand Ferdinand’s concept.
Also in this lesson we made a list of the code and conventions for a music magazine using our previous codes and conventions lists that we had made but adapting them specifically for the music magazine.

Codes and Conventions for a Music Magazine

- One image on the contents page is larger than the rest (main image)
- Use a 3/4/2 column layout
- Content- review of the year, gigs, about the bands, genre of music
- Pictures are different/ specific for each genre of music.
- Indie genre usually uses soft primary colours that are subtle rather than bright and in your face. The font is often black and white and in bold to make it stand out.
- Keywords- (bands/ artist) are in bold/larger/ in capitals to make it stand out.
- Black and white are usually the main colours with others depending on which genre
- The date (month and year) are above or by the contents heading.

We made this so that we would know what to include on our music magazine front cover and contents pages so that it would look realistic and follow the codes and conventions of a music magazine.