The document describes the process of designing an advertisement for a music magazine. Several draft designs are discussed and changes are made based on feedback. The final design orients the advertisement landscape instead of portrait, includes a black silhouette of the band members, uses purple and black colors to match the genre, and features a 3D effect on the band photo and CD cover to make them pop more. The designer believes the end result looks professional and suitable for a real music magazine.

1. Production process

2. The image on the left was not suitable because it was a long shot and on the magazine advert, seeing the whole of the body would have been unsuitable for the type of advert we were trying to produce. Also the lighting on the image wasn’t bright enough. The image on the right was not suitable for the advert because, firstly, the two people were spaced to far apart for the advert we were trying to create. Secondly, the girl was facing behind. We took this picture because we wanted to show a variety of images, however when it came to deciding what pictures to use, the general agreement was for the boy to be looking at the girl without so knowing, so this image was all wrong.

3. Although the image on the left was the right shot, you could see the shoes of the boy, which we didn’t want and the image of the boy and girl didn’t look right with the angle that the camera was. We thought out of all the pictures we took, the best ones were when they boy was standing to the right of the girl. Also the facial expressions were crucial, and these facial expressions weren’t that great. The image on the right is the same as the image on the left. The only difference is the distance in the shot, so we did not use the image for the same reasons.

4. This part was hard to get rid of because it was right by the hair and the hair was curly so it made it even harder. To get rid of it, I had to carefully go round the hair and the rest of the picture to eliminate the green screen and make the picture look as good as possible.

5. I started off with a plan black background, as that was part of the colour scheme that was chosen by our target audience. After doing that I added the basic things. I started off with the picture that I edited.

6. After doing this, I added the title which I made in Photoshop after following the steps from this link: http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photoshop-text/text-effects/light-burst/ This was a very long process, however the end result was very nice. The title reflected the genre of our song – Indie pop. The bright lights would attract the attention of our intended audience and it would also catch the attention of anyone that saw the poster. This, combined with the fact that it suited our advert was the reason that we chose this font. The large size immediately informs the audience of the name of the band, and anyone who was familiar with the name would read the magazine advert to see what it was about.

7. From one of the ideas from the storyboards, we thought that it would be a good idea to incorporate the spotlight into our advert. As the idea of the song, was centred around the girl, we wanted the spotlight to demonstrate this. After this we added the title of the song at the bottom and we chose white to contrast with the black. Once we did this, we needed to think of what similar magazines had, as we had the basic information and just needed to make it look more professional as there was a lot of free space around the picture and the overall effect didn’t look complete. We began looking at other magazines to see what we could include in ours, and from this began thinking of ideas. It was clear that the magazines used as much space as possible so we tried to do this to ours.

8. We thought that it would be a good idea to add “10/10” to our magazine to advertise the excellence of it so that the readers would want to watch the video, but the CD etc. we added the picture of the CD, which later on we was going to change to the finished album cover and added more promotions such as the “best music video ever.”

9. While looking for more text effects like the one we used for the title, we came across a tutorial on YouTube for one to make the bursts ‘light’ that you can see in purple. After completing one, we copied and pasted them all around our advert. At this point, we thought our advert was finished, however something about it made me think it looked unprofessional and incomplete. To me it looked more like a magazine than an advert promoting the music video. Because of this, as a group we decided to change the layout and the overall look of the advert. We decided to stick to the colour scheme that our target audience chose, as we thought that this was appropriate and we liked the colours chosen.

10. CHANGES...

11. Straight away the most obvious change that we made was changing it from portrait to landscape. Also we changed the background from black to purple. Another factor that influenced our decision to make it landscape was the fact that when it was portrait we couldn’t make the picture as big as we wanted to because it overlapped onto the title and this didn’t look right. After extensively looking through magazines for ideas, we decided to go back to our story board for our video. From this one of the ideas was to have the band in silhouette. I tried the effect and we decided that it looked good. To make the silhouette effect, I went over the picture with the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop and then used the Fill tool to fill it in black.

12. After this, we added the title that we had on our original poster, but the colours blended into the poster and it didn’t look right. So instead we decided to go for a similar effect but to and make it more simplistic, and look better. So we used the original font that we started off with for the top design and as an alternative used an outer glow. I think the effect of this is making the poster seem more suitable for the genre and giving the general look of the poster a more professional look than the above poster.

13. We used the same effect for the title of the song, but made the font smaller as we thought that the title was of less significance and made the outer glow less prominent for the same reason. We left a space in the middle of the poster intentionally for the CD cover to go. We thought that this would look good because as well as promoting the album it would be quite big so it would catch the attention of the audience.

14. I think the final effect of our poster is more like a professional magazine. the Green Day on the left is simple yet effective, as it advertises the magazine suitably for the rock genre that it appeals to and the writing also fits in with the rock genre that I think they are trying to target. This is an effect that I tried to replicate for the magazine advert. We wanted a simple design that looked genuine and wouldn’t look out of place in a music magazine like ‘Kerrang!’ or ‘NME.’ We think that we achieved this with the final magazine advert.

15. Even with the space in the middle being occupied, the space around it still looked blank. The sides parts such as ‘Kerrang’ and the “10/10” reminded me too much of a music magazine so I decided to get rid of them and in there place needed something else. Another thing that we altered in the poster was the picture. Our target audience suggested the idea to add an effect so the picture would be less flat. So we fiddled around with different effects in Adobe Photoshop and thought that the bevel and emboss effect looked the best in achieving the 3-D effect. So instead I decided to come up with this splat idea, that I thought looked quite popish, yet slightly rockish at the same time. We asked our target audience whether it looked too popish and they told us that it looked appropriate for the genre of magazine advert that we were producing.

16. This is the final poster for the magazine. For the CD cover in the middle I had to add a bevel and emboss effect to it so it didn’t look flat. This was the same effect used for the picture. By doing this it made the front cover look more 3-D like. I think the overall effect of the magazine advert, is a professional one and looks realistic.