From analyzing various hip-hop magazine covers, the student learned several key design elements to incorporate into their own magazine cover. These include featuring artists giving direct eye contact to portray a "gangster" image, keeping the cover simple with minimal text, and using all capital letters in a simplistic font for the masthead. The student also noticed some magazines experiment with including freebies on the cover and may try this approach. For the contents page, inspiration was taken from magazines using a single large image rather than many small ones and catchy article headlines. Analysis of double page spreads showed many featuring articles about rappers criticizing others, which could be replicated, and using a limited color scheme looks more polished than many colors. Student

1. Research
Evaluation

2. What you have learnt from your front
cover analysis and how will you use it in your
front cover?
From analysing the front covers of lots of different hip-hop magazines I’ve got an
idea of how my own magazine should look. One thing I noticed that a lot of the
featured artists in the main image are usually giving eye contact to the audience
and generally have a serious expression to portray the “gangster” image a lot of
rappers want to show. For my magazine I will probably ask my model to pose in a
similar way and not use things such as smiling which would portray a more silly or
fun magazine. I’ve learnt that it is important to keep your front page simple
without too much text or cover lines as you want the main focus to be on the
masthead and main image as they are what people first look at on a magazine. If
they want to know what’s inside they will flick to the contents page if the front
cover has too much text you risk it looking messy and cluttered. In hip-hop
magazines I’ve noticed that very rarely freebies are put on the front page like a lot
of other magazines I thought I could perhaps experiment with putting freebies on
my magazine as a unique selling point such as promotional codes or free
downloadable music. From this research I learnt that most hip-hop magazines
have all capitals on there front covers commonly in simplistic block lettering so I
will probably use this on my own front cover.

3. What you have learnt from your contents page analysis
and how will you use it in your contents page?
From analysing the contents page’s I have taken inspiration for my own magazine I
found that I preferred it when only one large image was used rather than a variety
of small ones so I would consider doing this. I’ve also learnt that it is important to
use catchy headlines for you articles otherwise they wont stand out. I think I will
try to incorporate a house style for my magazine to make it recognisable to my
readers

4. What you have learnt from your double page
spread analysis and how will you use it in your
double page spread?
From analysing double page spreads ive found in hip-hop many of the articles are
based on rappers being angry about other rappers, critics, etc so I could consider
writing a similar sort of article for mine. One thing I’ve learnt is that you should try
and stick to a few basic colours rather than use a massive variety. A simplistic
colour scheme that is done well looks much better. I’ve decided that I want to use
a whole page for an image as I liked this style but I will use the background of the
picture too rather than photoshopping the image onto a white background like
many other magazines did as this would give me a unique selling point

5. What you have learnt from your questionnaire
and focus group?
I have learnt the importance of listening to what your target audience would like
to get from your magazine. With their opinions I think it has greatly helped me
understand how to really try and meet the needs of my audience through ways
such as telling me what artists they’d like to see in a music magazine and they
challenged ideas that I had for the magazine which I would not have realised may
be bad and used them anyway. From my questionnaire I got some suprising
results that allowed me to create a unique selling point because most magazines
do not feature hip-hop from around the world so when I asked the question if
people would be interested in that they said they would so I could use this to
create an article on maybe an English rapper which you would not see in a big hip-
hop music magazine