At the beginning of my research I used everyday, ordinary magazine covers as examples and case studies and by that I mean magazines with five or six cover lines, a colour scheme of three shades, and lots of attention grabbing features. Examples of this are Vogue, Empire, and Q. There's a generic theme they all follow which I've depicted in this prezi: 
I've always been pro-being unauthentic so when I first analysed the National Geographic cover [x], I was a fan of this layout as it still used traditional magazine features like four colours and six cover lines, but redeveloped them into a modern and minimalist style by placing them all at the bottom of the page. After that I was inspired by raw and fresh format covers, like National Geographic, i-D, and The Gentlewoman. I've also made a prezi showing their individuality:
So, I took elements from both magazines style for my magazine cover. I kept it authentic with a colour scheme of four (white, yellow, pink, and blue), two fonts (DIN Condensed and Times New Roman), and the position of my master head and barcode. Adversely I mixed it up by having one main cover line and anchoring text to that, a border, and by making the barcode white instead of black. A while ago I studied representations [x] and colour [x], and I learnt about how a colour palette can connote something about the model or magazine, so I used contradictory colours. The clothing and makeup are white, red, and black which is a seductive colour scheme due to the way its represented in media. For example:
Betty Boob was a sexy cartoon in the 1930's who sang about how much her audience loved her and how happy she made them. She only ever appeared in a red tight dress with red lipstick and was known for her short black hair and porcelain white skin. The main principle of her character is young, sexy and frisky, so her outfit and the colours help to denote this vibe.
In 2014 Shakira and Rihanna released a song titled "Can't Remember to Forget You" and in the video they danced up and down a corridor wearing black and red dresses, grinding on the walls. The stylists chose to dress them in red and black because red and black symbolise danger, sexiness, and sauciness, which is what Shakira aimed for. In the video for the 2005 song "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas, Fergie wears a combination of white, black and red garments as she bops her body to the song about love and sex.
And also red is sexy due to the connotations of roses which are a typical symbol of love. Vice verse pastel colours (the pink, yellow and blue are all specifically pastel shades) are connotations of confectionary and children's toys, innocent and sweet things that are never sexualised. As I explained in my analysis of the magazine cover [x], I wanted there to be this divide between the colours as it's more intriguing than a simple one connotation colour scheme. What I'm trying to say is the mis-en-scene elements are of an alluring and seductive colour palette but the graphic hues were soft and babyish, so these two things clash and that's something I aspired for; I wanted to challenge the ordinary one colour-scheme rule which most magazines abide by.
Another thing I was trying to combat was the several cover line rule. I really admire how i-D magazine summarises who their cover model is, in one or two words. I think it gives us an incite into (obviously the model's personality but more so) what i-D stands for and it creates more of an introduction for the audience which makes me as a reader feel more eager to read. I was following this notion in all my edits up until making the official cover (edit 5), where I decided to add a bit of text underneath, firstly to make the cover look more sophisticated but the other reason as to why I kept it, is because it's like a more detailed introduction which will hopefully encourage readers who don't know who Seah is, to read because they like her momentum.
I knew from the beginning that I wanted to challenge the generic titles "contents page" and "editor's letter", because I wanted something pretentious so that Cherry Bomb seems witty. Therefore I called the contents page "ingredients" because essentially all ingredients are, are components towards a bigger creation, just like the contents of a magazine. Then I called the editor's letter "first word" because I saw Transworld Magazine do this and it was the only alternative name I could think of.
Contents pages always look so professional and preppy, which I don't like. Magazines which aren't polished like Shout and Ok!, which have a savvy contents page's confuse me. I always wonder why are they trying to give the impression that they are slick? Why not just embody their genre in the contents page? Cherry Bomb is a magazine for young people so I am embodying the audience by having a background which links to them, because the majority of young people are studying, so a lined notebook canvas suits the audience.
Contents pages always look so professional and preppy, which I don't like. Magazines which aren't polished like Shout and Ok!, which have a savvy contents page's confuse me. I always wonder why are they trying to give the impression that they are slick? Why not just embody their genre in the contents page? Cherry Bomb is a magazine for young people so I am embodying the audience by having a background which links to them, because the majority of young people are studying, so a lined notebook canvas suits the audience.
The other day I was flicking through Tank magazine and National Geographic and what both of them have but in different ways is pages which introduces a double page article. Pictures below:
I've discovered through this evaluation that something I have really aspired to replicate in my magazine is introductions. I admire how these pages slowly sink the reader into the topic, instead of hastily beginning. However a double page poster seemed to lengthy for my magazine, therefore I stripped it down to one page which is the left hand-side of the spread. Once again it shows who Seah Polly is, it tells the reader what the page is about ("10 questions with Seah Polly") and it gives credits to the people who made the article.
And that's another thing I did to contrast the majority of magazines; The other day I was flicking through Glamour and Elle magazine and they displayed the credits for the articles where the pages crease which I thought was rude because it's not giving the artists blatant acknowledgement, and so I knew I wanted to show case the credits in an obvious place, so that my audience will see Cherry Bomb as a crediting and kind establishment.
The textual side of the double page spread is similar to most magazines. In my previous draft [x] I was trying to go against the traditional column layout, however I don't want to confuse the reader and I want to maintain a sense of ordinary-ness, therefore I stuck to an normal layout.
And that's another thing I did to contrast the majority of magazines; The other day I was flicking through Glamour and Elle magazine and they displayed the credits for the articles where the pages crease which I thought was rude because it's not giving the artists blatant acknowledgement, and so I knew I wanted to show case the credits in an obvious place, so that my audience will see Cherry Bomb as a crediting and kind establishment.
The textual side of the double page spread is similar to most magazines. In my previous draft [x] I was trying to go against the traditional column layout, however I don't want to confuse the reader and I want to maintain a sense of ordinary-ness, therefore I stuck to an normal layout.
According to the profile and ownership post [x], a reader of Cherry Bomb is a lady in further education between the years of 17 and 21. She is interested in music, fashion and beauty so Cherry Bomb suits her because it focuses on music, fashion and art.
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Cherry Bomb's parent company is Time Inc. (source x) which owns countless magazines such as Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life, Golf Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly. In spite of the dozens of outlets it has, it only has one music magazine which is NME. I chose Time Inc. because Cherry Bomb has a similar minimal format to NME.
NME has one main cover line like Cherry Bomb and only one image, but it differs with a transparent mastered and one puff and no border. Fundamentally both of their layouts are very simplistic and therefore they can easily link to each other as sister and brother companies with the excuse that they both have adopted the minimal aesthetic. Additionally NME is also for young people and according to this slide-share [x], the majority of it's audience are 69% male, which is perfectly paradox to Cherry Bomb's audience which is mainly female. And finally, NME and Cherry Bomb have the same focus as I stated... music. It's obvious from the fact that both of them have musicians as their cover models. Therefore Cherry Bomb is suitable for Time Inc. because I think they need more musical magazines.
(Transcript: Cherry Bomb's audience are young females. I think, generally, females are more attracted to magazines with female models. Not to say that a girl won't read a magazine with a man on it, but according to discussions I've had with my friends, there's sort of a global notion among woman to support other women, so for women I think magazines with female cover models are most popular. And for this reason, I used a female cover model.
The age group I;'m targeting (17-21 year olds) are generation Y, and this is the generation who were the first gineau pigs of social media and blogging forums like tumblr and myspace. Due to this ability to tell your story and globally share your thoughts and feelings at your finger tips, I think being a warrior of social justice is now a part of youth culture. Youths are opinionated about politics, feminism, equalism, islamaphobia, everything like that. Therefore I kept this is mind when picking the colours; I didn't want to push Seah into an overly feminine box, which is why I used blue as well as pink.
Due to their age, I think the audience will include elements of slang in their vocabulary, therefore in the editor's letter I used slang such as "preggerz", "homies" and also multi-modal language like "ily". I think this creates a friendly and familiar connection between the editor and the reader, and also it's light and refreshing, setting the tone as this for the rest of the magazine.
On the ownership and profile page, I said that the reader is likely to be interested in makeup and beauty, and therefore I wanted Seah to have bold makeup, which is why she wore red lipstick on the front cover.
In the double page spread I based my highlighted names, words and phrases on things that will appeal to my target audience. The phrase "teen antics" embodies mischeivious, fun, and happy adolescents, "frank ocean" is an artist who the audience will probably listen to because he produces fun, popular among youths and hip-hop songs. "nirvana" is a state for buddhists but cherry bomb's audience will be so open-minded and broadly educated that they'll understand it.)
The main application which I used to create my magazine was Adobe Photoshop, and the main technology items I used was a camera and a computer. The first thing I did was take pictures using a Nikon P7100 camera, and then I uploaded them to a school computer and edited them. Originally I used an internet application called Pic Monkey, however these edits didn't look as professional as a magazine should so I switched to Adobe Photoshop. I filmed a couple of videos showing how I made the edits but essentially (for the cover), I used the magic wand tool to separate the model from the background and then I copy and pasted her figure onto a coloured background and then used the shape tool to make the border and text to add the text. I think considering the fact that Adobe Photoshop is an exclusive, reliable and also expensive application, it is probably what genuine magazine editors use.
For each of the pages aside from the front cover, I used the application Pages to draft the content. This app was good as it allowed me to quickly make changes and also check my spelling and grammar before actually applying it to the format.
Often, I reverted back to picmonkey.com but this was to resize elements of pages like the barcode or the poloroid picture on the double page spread. One thing I found with photoshop was that one could not resize or reshape images and instead one would be forced to keep it original.
In the preliminary task I used my phone to take the photographs, instead of the professional camera I used in my main task. As the camera I used was a DSLR camera, the photographic opportunities were stretched and I could easily orchestrate the lighting or zoom into pictures as I took them. And I could do this with the iPhone 5, however the quality of the picture was very vulnerable and adding extra light and so on, often resulted in the image becoming pixilated.
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