Proposal Form

Describe your idea for the brief: I will create my own music magazine and design a front cover, contents page and also a double page spread for the proposed magazine. I intend to make it affordable and interesting to appeal to an audience. The magazine will be called ENIGMA and I intend to make it look high-quality and professional. The cover will feature a drawing with dark colours of the band, it will have a large masthead and will be full of bold text to go along with the bold image that will be used. It will have an eye-catching tag line to attract the audience. The contents page will be casual and a little cluttered, this will appeal to the target audience. It will have lots of pictures and bright colours to make it stand out well. The text will be quite large to catch the attention of the reader. The double page spread will also have big pictures and big bold titles to stand out and also catch the attention of the reader.

Genre/ sub genre: list similar texts which have inspired your thoughts The magazine will feature articles, bands and imagery that relate to the Rock music genre. I have looked at various magazines and how they use colour, text and content to appeal to their genre and audience; these magazines are Kerrang, NME and Classic Rock magazine, as well as a few smaller ones. I found a few magazines that use drawings and animated characters on their covers, these caught my attention and I though they were very interesting and special. I specifically liked the covers which featured the Gorillaz, these were full of detail and they were very eye-catching and they worked very well with the genre of the magazine. The characters were very stereotypical with a rocker look. These covers inspired me to make something similar but with my own twist and take on them.

Target audience: gender/ age/ characteristics/ behaviour The magazine will be aimed at a mostly male audience. It will be a young teen audience going up to early 20's. The characteristics may be tattoos, long hair, maybe more likely to be an outcast or different from 'the norm'. So the magazine needs to be relatable. My audience will most likely enjoy going to a lot of gigs, so it could also be a good idea to sell the magazine at venues. Because my target audience is young males, they are likely to enjoy playing video games on, likely, an X-Box 360 or PS3. This is useful for the type of content the magazine could have and it also gives us a better understanding of our audience. Based on this, I could include game reviews in the magazine or it could influence the advertisements that are in the magazine. Because my audience are young and have less disposable income than an adult, they are more likely to eat fast food. My audience is young so they are likely to involved with a lot of social media, so I could make a Facebook page or a Twitter account for my magazine witch buyers could follow for the latest news on my magazine. They are likely to download their music so I could advertise music on iTunes for the band that I will feature in my magazine, this will appeal to my audience and show I am connecting with my audience. They are more likely to be interested a little in fashion and will most likely shop in TOPMAN and H&M and might wear Converse shoes.

Major conventions I will use I will use large text to stand out to the reader. I will use brighter bold fonts as well, this will jump out more. The cover will be busy, to show the magazine is fun, less serious and mature and appeal to the younger audience. Dark imagery to show that rock style of the magazine and represent the genre. I will use a large masthead to catch the attention of the buyer. I will include the necessary information on the front cover with the barcode in the bottom right corner. The main image will be bold and eye-catching to appeal to the buyer. The main sell-line will be big and position near the centre of the magazine cover and it will be the biggest and boldest text on the cover, besides the masthead. There will be a sub-head right below the main sell-line. The cover will be dark with a bit of bright colours to make sure the cover is still bold and eye-catching. The contents page will be full of images and big text. It will have one large image talking about the main article, this will be the cover story. The double page spread will have lots of big images with a big title. There will be a little text but not pages full.

Conventions I may subvert/ change/ not use A lot of the rock magazines only use images of the band/singer on the cover. I may also introduce art and cartoon aspects into the cover to show mixed media and also to make my magazine stand out from the crowd. This has been done with a magazine cover starring the Gorillaz but very few times. Just about all magazines add in the masthead on Photoshop separately, I will try and incorporate the logo into the drawing that I will do for the magazine cover.

Original images: what/ where/ what Photography of a band that will have adult rock cartoon characters added into them. I may also use drawings with the characters for the contents page or maybe the double page spread. Other photographs of bands performing for the contents page and images of rock instruments to relate to the genre. I may just use a drawing for the cover and show pictures of the band in the double page spread, this will keep some of the mystery. Because I will be drawing all of the characters and it needs to look very professional and it also needs to fit in with the genre and not look out of place, I will need to do a lot of research and planning. I will need to design my own original characters in a short period of time, so I will need to get an idea of what they should and shouldn't look like.

Potential difficulties/ Plan B: The main difficulties with these ideas are time related; Will I have enough time to design characters from scratch that will be unique and also digitally make them and combine them with the photos in a professional manner. As a plan B, I will photograph a rock artist will face paint on, maybe a skull covering his face. This will still make the cover stand out. Other problems I might encounter is deletion or loss of work, to overcome this I will have to back up all of my work, this will help avoid these problems. It will take up more time but it will be well worth the extra effort if such thing does happen.