Coursework Evaluation: Forms and Conventions

My music magazine is genre specific toward Goths and their death/heavy metal music. They layout of the magazine, itself, isn’t representative of the youth culture, but the colour scheme is. Black is one of the key colours in the youth culture. Secondary colours include blues and reds. The secondary colours are used in my magazine to highlight these variations. The red is linked in with my Masthead; “Blood Rage” by adding red to the “blood” section of the masthead it is connoting the obsession with death metal music and the overall obsession with death. I used some white text to highlight the key words in my cover lines and to make the text in my double-page spread and contents page stand out so that it may be read clearly and to a good standard. Rage is used to connote the tempo of the music; fast and furious drum beats are used throughout the songs and are often described as rage music. I tried to focus my text around two completely different fonts. One being a serif font and the other not, I used two types to connote the 2 sub-styles of Goths. One type tends to be very fancy and almost erotic in their lifestyle whereas the other tends to be very hardcore and closely linked to the magazine.

My photographs were a challenge to take because I had to think closely about the nature of some Goths and the composition of lighting and backgrounds. My front cover image was not as much of a challenge as the others. The person in the image is giving the “v-finger” and a very distinct sneer which could be used to connote their attitude and disrespect for authority. I didn’t use images of Goths smiling because that doesn’t appear to happen very often in their lifestyle. Instead I tried to get them being very casual, not smiling and in areas where they tend to “hang-out”. So I chose to take some of my photos in the corridors of the college to connote their age and their social class. The use of the exterior glowing of the cover lines on the front cover was used to effectively make them stand out and be more attractive to the youths by clearly showing observers the target audience and the specific colour preferences of the culture.

I tried to make the double page spread a fairly simple but fairly traditional layout. For a gothic music magazine, it had to have some hardcore elements like for example the gothic magazine “Metalhammer” which is extremely hardcore and almost frightening. I added no frightening elements to the magazine because I tried to represent their personality rather than their appearance but the hardcore elements were required to represent the music.

The layout of the double page spread was nothing really special except for the extremely narrow gutters and the larger-than-normal quantity of the pull quotes. However, the position of the pull quotes is fairly unusual. Many pull quotes from other magazines are placed in between to columns and the text is wrapped around them. I haven’t done that, I have merely allowed a large space for the pull quotes to be larger than the rest of the text but remain in the column rather than in-between two of them. I had good reason for doing this; I used it to connote the truth about Goths. That they are in line with us and are just like us, but they dress differently and listen to different music. The world would be boring if everyone dressed the same and listened to the same music.

The use of the large white text across the legs of the people in the image is used to denote the bands name but the image itself is used to represent the age and attitude of the group. It is easy to tell from the image the attitude of the youth culture. My end sign for the double page spread was difficult to decide upon despite its simplicity. I thought about something that everyone would know, even the Goths and finally decided upon this, “: P”. Purely because it has a slight humour to it and everyone knows what it is used for.
The contents page has a similar layout to NME music magazine. I used this layout to add more of a hardcore feel to it. I used the magazine slogan; “The RAGE of death and heavy metal” to carry on the house style. The house style, itself, is hardcore, black/red/blue/white, non-serif/serif font and lots of blood effects. So I have made use of real magazines and altered their colour scheme and layout to make my own music magazine.