Preliminary Task

As part of my coursework I am told I must produce a college magazine front cover and analyse it. This is to get a better understanding of what we should and shouldn't put in our College magazine.
I have already found out the image on the cover has to be a medium shot, now I just have to find a suitable image that looks professional.

Along with the cover, I am also tasked to make a mock of a contents page and need to find a good layout of the magazine so that it looks good and professional. All this had to be done on Publisher and using Photoshop so I will have to improve my skills with it.

 

Analysing A College Magazine

College Magazine:


This is the school magazine i will be analysing and i'm going to analyse the magazine and critique it and then say what i would do to improve the magazine.

The first thing, that i see when i look at the magazine is the name of the magazine 'The Cardinal bulletin', there is snow on the title showing that this is a Christmas issue and it mentions about a  'Christmas Concert' at the bottom which has the ideology that this is a Catholic school. The less obvious elements that show this is a Christmas issue is the colour scheme which is red and white which are colours associated with Christmas (candy canes etc).

The one thing that does attract my attention is the title 'Soul Food' which takes up a lot of space and is bold to be eye catching and its the main point of the magazine

By looking at the multiple pictures of students you can see that the school focuses heavily on students enjoyment at the school and extra curricular activities they provide for the students.

However this magazine is not visually appealing due to the heavy text and over powers the rest of the page, the audience the magazine is aimed at is 11-16 year olds and they would be unlikely to sit down and read this for 10 minutes. It should be short, quick paragraphs to appeal more to them and appeal to them more, this could be improved by including more colourful features to liven the page up a little and make it more appealing to eye.

Music Magazine Analysis 1

Feminism

The basic belief of what feminism means is the hatred of men or that woman have been 'second' class citizens when compared to a man. However some feminists disagree with this generalisation of this belief.


The history of feminism:

Feminism originally came from France in the !800's but the struggle for equality has been around since America in the 1900's but become best known during the 60's or 70's. Woman traditionally have been regarded as second class citizens when compared to males in society, they were deemed inferior to men on an intellectual scale and a physical one. In the past woman could not own property in their own names however over time woman have evolved to have more freedom and have equal rights as men do. 


Famous Feminists:

Some famous modern day feminists include Beyonce, Ellen Page,  Amy Poehler and Zooey Deschanel who have similar views on sexism and different ideas of what parts of sexism are still in modern times.



Laura Mulvey's Theory:
In 1975, Laura Mulvey wrote an essay called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" she about her theory of the 'male gaze'. The theory is that the male gaze comes into play when the camera puts the audience in the perspective of a heterosexual male, so the camera may focus on a woman to show her best assets and it will show the woman more as an object rather than a person.


Representation of woman in a music magazine:

Megan Fox is presented on this magazine cover of the rolling stones and could be seen as being objectified as being attractive. She has been presented in this way to catch the 'male gaze' and encourage men to buy the magazine. This supports the Laura Mulvey theory. Megan Fox also has nothing to do with music showing Rolling Stones are trying to market to men more.

Magazine Terminology

In this post i have made a list of different features used in magazines along with their definition.

Masthead: Name of the magazine

Headline: Title of the main story featured within the magazine

House style: The main colour scheme used in the magazine

Main Image: Image of an artist or band who are the main feature within the magazine.

Pug: A promotional free item

Buzzwords: Words like "exclusive" and "wow" used  to catch the readers eye. 

Banner: Colourful banner across the page with text that promotes a feature.

Barcode: Code and convention that is on every front page and tells us the price of the magazine.

Puff: Graphic feature on the front cover of a magazine to make something stand out.

Caption: Text describing the image

Cover line: Advertising the other topics inside the magazine.

What is Semiotic Theory?

Semiotic Theory focuses on the social and cultural meaning of codes and conventions,  the signs consist of an image/word/object or practice. Signs used can be presented in many different ways: image, word, video. We identify and respond to these signs by two terms which are Denotation and Connotation.


Denotation: 

Denotation is the literal or primary meaning behind a word, image or sign. 

 

Connotation:

Connotation is the idea that a word or a sign portrays for a person. It can set a tone or an emotional association that a word can have. It can be both negative and positive. A stop sign would be a connotation of danger.

Semiotic Theory in Music Magazines

 Analysing the front cover of this Kerrang Music Magazine, the denotation reveals that this Music Magazine has a rock artist focus. 

 

On the  cover is a picture of Paramore singer Hayley  Williams with two fingers up to the camera to help aid with the sub heading "Young rebels". House style colours are red, black and white. The expression on her face shows that she just doesn't care and has an attitude  and makes it look like the artist has direct control over the magazine especially with a  large image of the artist with a black background to give off an impression of power and this is further  done by the large image of the artist with a black background to make her stand out then the large bold text is placed on top.

Applying the male gaze to a scene:








In this short clip it highlights a scene with Mercedes (Jennifer Metcalfe) where a drink gets spilled on her top and she has to take her top off, she does this in a seductive way showing she is enjoying the male attention and this attracts more attention to her body then the scene itself.

The Male Gaze theory is supported in this clip by Hollyoaks using a attractive female to attract the male audience.  There is a medium shot throughout so the audience can see her chest despite there being another person in the scene. Edits used are High Key Lighting to connote that she is the main person to look at in the clip.

Please take the time to complete my questionnaire about music magazines so i can use the results to help get a better idea of the music magazine demographic and why or why not people buy them.

Questionnaire