Music magazine flat plans

Front cover

Above is a picture of my flat plan for my front cover of my music magazine. This flat plan includes a main image, of the artist 'Melinda' who will feature in my double page spread, this image fills the whole of the front cover.
Sub-headings include well known interviews with well known artists of the indie/rock genre that my target audience will be interested in (e.g. Ed Sheeran), this will entice my target audience to want to purchase and therefore read the articles included in the magazine.
In the bottom left corner, I've included a bar-code, which would be scanned when a magazine has been purchased. I chose to place this in the bottom left corner as, from the music magazines I have looked at, this tends to be the conventional place to have it. I may choose to include the price of the magazine in this area, instead of next to the date, as some magazines just have the price by the bar code.
The masthead 'Tuner' is also in the conventional place, top left corner. I'm currently planning on have a font that mimics the volume level bars, as this connotates music which obviously links with the nature of the music magazine. Also, if I have the bars going into the red area, this connotates loud music - and the stereotype is that teenagers like to have their music loud, so this should appeal to my target audience.

example of volume bars

In the top right hand corner I have included a promotional offer of a free poster of a popular band in this genre, The Horrors. I found offering free goods within the magazine was a popular way of attracting the audience to purchase their magazines when looking at other music magazines.
Another thing I'm promoting on my front cover will be a competition to win a trip to New York City, to see the Arctic Monkeys perform live, I chose to use The Arctic Monkeys as they are another popular (recently headlined at VFestival) and well known band within the genre. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to use and edit some of my photos from my recent trip to NYC. As you can see from my flat plan, I'm choosing to promote this competition in the form of a Polaroid photo, with the photo from New York in the space where an actual photo would be, and the writing below briefly explaining the competition in a font that is similar to natural hand writing. I believe making it appear like a polariod photo will appeal to the target audience because when they would remember them from when they were younger, and see it as a 'cool' and almost vintage aspect of the magazine - which I feel appeals to the Indie side of the genre.



Contents page

Above is an image of my flat plan for my contents page. My current idea for my layout of the contents page is to have a large picture of the top of a guitar, and the neck. Where the frets are, im planning to continue them off of the guiatar neck and have the headings of the contents sitting on them. I feel this use of the guitar ties in well with the genre of my magazine, as a guitar is a key instrument in rock/indie bands and artists work. I plan to have images scattered around the page, next to or near the relevant heading; this is where I could use my pictures that I photographed at gigs and festivals. I also plan on using my contents page to advertise suscribing to the magazine, as I saw that this is what NME does in their magazines.


Double Page Spread

For my double page spread I am going to have the name of the artist it is featuring (Melinda) fairly slanted, this is to connotate that she's not a plain, regular, boring, female artist; but that she's fairly different and unexpected (just like you wouldn't expect a slanted heading). Im planning on using one of my images from one of her photo shoots on the first page on the left, at the moment I think this will be an image showing her whole body as my current idea for my front cover is to maybe choose a mid shot, the text will mold around this photo. I'm planning to have my first page filled with an article generally about the artist, and the second with a Q & A style interview, which will ask questions which will intrigue and interest my readers. On the second page, in the bottom right corner, I have tried to show consistency of the style of my magazine between this page and the front page by showing some more pictures of the artist in the form of polaroid pictures.