Main Task Planning

Original images

Institutional data: Music Magazine

One of the most well-known music magazines ever made is NME with well over 400,000 readers picking up the magazine on a weekly basis. The magazine has been running for almost 60 years and was launched in 1952. The target audience that the NME is trying to reach is male’s ages between 17-30 years of age although; the average age of NME readers is 25. NME has succeeded in reaching this audience as 73% of the readers are males and only 27% of the readers being female.  A large majority of the NME readers fit into the ABC1 social statuses what are A Upper-Middle class, B Middle class and C1 Lower-Middle class, in fact a huge 73% of NME’s reads fit into these groups.  

Analysis of Kerrang Front Cover and Contents Page and Article (Kerrang)

The Kerrang magazine focuses on Rock music such as metal, punk, post-hardcore and tries to appeal to people who would class themselves in this genre stylistically. You can assume this a first glance of this magazine cover as just above the main headline it reads “Sex. Drugs. Violence.” The style of the text also suggest aggression and violence, this also goes for the title text of the magazine.

Moving onto the images, the magazine displays one dominant image across the page with 2 supporting images towards the bottom left corner. The main image is of a well know metal band, you can almost tell what music genre they fit into just from this image. Only black clothes, sun glasses, tattoos, various weapons being held; all this suggests aggression and is a representation of the music they play. This allows the audience to look at the cover and decide very quickly if the magazine is for them, or not.

The colours used on this particular issue of Kerrang are slightly unusual as it has a lot of bright yellow; I think this was done to counter the fact that the main image is mostly black. If they had continued this theme to the text and borders the magazine would have not been eye catch and would appear very dull. Despite this they did not use many different colours on the front cover, limiting their selves to just 4 different colours (excluding the images). This keeps it from looking messy and remains easy on the eyes.  Again the use of the colour red can suggest aggression.

The contents page holds most of the same themes as the front cover most of the images are expressing anger or violence and it keeps the same colour scheme. The main sections of the magazine are written in yellow with a black box around them to make them stand out. This makes it possible for the reader to navigate the magazine with relative ease.   



This is one of the articles from the Kerrang magazine. It has one dominant image taking up a majority of the page. It continues the theme of being very image heavy just like the front cover and contents page. However, with this particular article the theme of aggression has been removed to fit the band that features genre and style. The colour scheme is very similar; using the same black and yellow as the contents page and front cover however the red has been removed as not to suggest and sort of violence or aggression.

The article is written in a very informal fashion as the target audience would themselves be rather informal. The first line “With a spring in their step and an attitude to match” shows that the article is going in a very informal, non-serious and fun way. This will appeal to both the audience and the band as judging by the picture the band isn’t too serious either and the readers will be young and not want to read through a serious, formal article.      

Front cover (Classic FM)

Classic FM is a music magazine focusing on the classical side of music. From the first look at this cover you can immediately market as it features a middle aged man.  Classic FM cover takes a completely different approach to its front cover. It tries to attract a more mature, sensible audience than Kerrang does. They keep the colour scheme simple with black and white and the odd splash of red. The headline for the magazine is in gold to suggest a mature, possibly higher class theme to the magazine. 

The magazine has a dominant image of Paul McCartney who is a very well-known face within this genre. Contrasting with the Kerrang image this one shows a relatively calm facial expression and is in no way threatening. This works well for this genre of magazine as it would usually be aimed at the older market and they would not want to deter them.

Contents Page (Q)

The Q magazine contents page is very structured and neat in comparison with the Kerrang contents page which is purposely untidy and unstructured to fit the mind set of their target audience. The structure is also very conformant in the sense that it is very similar to what you would expect a large majority of magazine contents pages to look like (Title top left, date top right, list of contents down the left hand side, pictures to the right etc.) The colours used are also very similar to a lot of other magazines using the same black, white and red design.  

Feature Article (ETC)

This feature article is very minimalistic compared to the Kerrang magazine. Only 2 images are used and a large majority of the page is taken up by text. Although the pictures are not dominant or large the positioning still draws the reader’s attention straight to the picture. The colours that are used are very neutral, mostly black and white with just a little bit of red to prevent the page looking dull. You can tell the target audience is different to that of the Kerrang article as the facial expression on the models does not express any sort of emotion, suggesting the magazine and band are very serious. You can also tell by the pull out quote that the band has a low tolerance to people; calling them stupid and lazy, whereas Kerrang readers wouldn’t expect to see direct insults within the magazine. 

Intial Ideas for my own Music Magazine

• Similar in style to Kerrang
• Colours: Blacks, reds, yellows and white
• 1 Dominant image for front cover
• 3 Images for contents page
• 2  Large images for feature article
• Informal written style

 Cast, Props, Setting, Location Report

The cast I will be using will be made up of 3 of my friends. Only one will feature of my friends. The reason I chose this particular friend for my main image is because he fits into the style that you would expect to see someone of the Rock genre. The props that I will be using are 2 different Guitars: one a black, Stratocaster electric guitar the other an acoustic guitar (possibly). I may also use a guitar amp. The setting of the photograph will hopefully be on a stage however, if I cannot gain access to a stage when it is needed, the image will be taken up against a green wall so I can easily edit the person out and attempt to make him look like he is on stage.   

Construction Planning

Front Cover Structure

The structure of the front cover will have one large image acting as a background with everything else ontop of it. There will be small sections off to the bottom right with brief information of what can be found inside. The barcode will be and the very bottom of the magazine to the leftand will contain the issue number and price within the white section of the barcode. The main magazine title (magazine name) will be at the top in the middle.  

Title Font Type/ Colour

I have narrowed my choice of title fonts down to these 8 fonts and two colours. I chose these fonts as I felt that they would be suitable for a music magazine of this type; none of them are just basic fonts that you would find in the generic music magazine and they all have their own, very unique characteristic to them.

The two colours I chose for the fonts is black and red. The reason for the use of these colours is because black would almost always be found on the attire of the bands that fit into the genre of the magazine and red is a suggestion of aggression and violence.