Improvements

After receiving feedback from my Media Studies teacher and fellow peers, I have made a couple of amendments to my work as I considered their perspectives of the codes and conventions used within music magazines. Improvements include:

Construction:

Front cover: 
Whilst comparing my front cover with some of Q magazine issues, I realized how empty the top part of my cover looks due to the positioning of the central image; to make the overall front cover look even more professional and believable, I increased the size of the image and made it large enough so that I could get rid of the unnecessary grey space that was clearly visible before. This is because after comparing my front cover with other existing magazine covers, I realized that in order for mine to be more believable and professional, I decided to follow the convention of how the close-up shot featuring artist always have their head touching the top edge of the page. Here is the final improvements made to the front cover:

Contents page:
Although the design and layout of my contents page looked believable enough to be handed out among other music magazines, it still didn't appear professional enough in terms of the detail of contents inserted. This is why I went onto InDesign to add more pages within the issue to fill in the empty spaces because when I looked at many of Q's contents page, their contents would be detailed and full of pages, usually around the average maximum of 100 pages per issue.

Double page spread:
My aim here was to keep it simple, neat and organized which reflects my publication. However, there were a few areas of my double page spread where it appeared to be too empty. To avoid this, I inserted a title for the image as 'Cover Star' (making sure to match my masthead as part of the house style) to make it even more obvious to the reader who the featured artist is of the issue. I also put a pull quote (a brief phrase from the body text) with the intention of grabbing the viewer's attention even more so they read the article as they get curious, and start wondering where the featured artist said that. In short; to add emphasis and interest. This has been placed to the top right side of the image because this was where the most space was for text to be big enough to read once it has been printed.

Front cover; Contents page (Updated)

I had a proper look back at my documents to thoroughly check the spelling and grammar specifically in my double page spread as this was the document with the most writing contents. However, I noticed that the same artist was mentioned twice on the front cover and there was a typo on the contents page (I got rid of the extra 'e' that was in the word 'delivery' and the unnecessary letter 'b' in the word 'Album' is now removed). I have inserted the updated versions of my documents below:

Evaluation Q7

Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?