My Own Music Magazine Double Page Spread:

Evaluation:

Conventions:

The reason the two pages do not match completely and cut out the person in middle's face is because I visualized the cross over in the two pages to have this effect and so did each page separately with an end in mind.

I do not feel that obscuring the persons face and almost whole of their head takes away clarity and merit to this image. In this circumstance, given the connotations of destruction that go along with a title like "Apocalypse" I believe the person is much less important than the surrounding shot and paraphernalia that comes with a bomb shelter.

In this way I may have gone against conventions of keeping the person the most important focus of the image.

I have however followed other conventions of this page such as the quote from the article given at the bottom, made clearly visible so that at a glance it can be read.
I also a strong title font and positioned it well against a dark background, so that it was clearly readable.

Representation of Social Groups:

My double page spread, may be unconventional in that it does not concentrate on a band or an artist so much on this page. However, this blurring of a persons face does well to connect with the representation of the 'loner' or the 'emo' that has emerged not as a group per se but as another social stereotype. The concept of a figure breaking away from others and going away somewhere alone, with a backdrop of destruction is the epitome of the emergent 'emo' stereotype and the associated antisocial psyche.

Attracting target audience:

Again, like the contents page, although there are darker themes present there is still a good deal of references to rock culture that would engage with such an audience. And again, quite often a mainstream rock band (or less mainstream) may produce an album with apparently darker themes and the band is no less popular for it.

The detail of the image, even with connotations of destruction could be from any band releasing an album and so would attract an audience that followed the rock/metal genre.

Unlike previous pages, there is no clear gender bias towards males. In other pages the main character is shown to be male, or people in band photographs were obviously male. Here however, the obscuring of the face means less exclusion of females. Even if it is still clear that the person is male, their gender in the image matters much less.

What I learned about the software I used:

Using GIMP once again, I made use of border markers to try to keep each page of the double page spread in line while developing them separately  This was something I had not done before, and took some practice to be able to use effectively.

Lessons learned from this product:

Revisiting an earlier lesson of aiming to go for a more simplistic and practical approach I would like to expand and modify that, in future projects I would keep layout and design simplistic and yet aim for the most creative approaches to key features to a particular page. In this double page spread for example I felt confident that simple layout would work and thus was able to spend more time creating the photograph that dominated the page.



Please Note: Neither the contents page or the double page spread will contain a section on distribution or outlining who the target audience will be, as this is a constant throughout the magazine and was laid out clearly in the evaluation of the front cover.