Idea
Upon looking at the local music scene in stoke, I realized that there are very few proper metal bands that are getting press, as most of the more popular bands within the local area are the type of band that sound bad, but are popular due to fashion. I then decided to make the bands within my magazine the kind of music I enjoy & know that other people I know enjoy the kind of music that’s played by hairy guys in t-shirts, denim & leather. I then took this concept & used it within the “A Word from the Editor” section of my contents page, in which I railed at the use of irony as an excuse for writing poor quality music. This lead me to talk to some friends in a local metal band, who then became my cover stars.
Photographs
After I left a message on the band’s guitarist’s myspace page, asking if they would be alright, the band agreed to do a photo shoot, this lead me to begin my search for suitable places to hold the photo shoot. There were various places that I considered, a small ruinous building near Stoke, the graveyard of a local church, a local guitar shop & a local recording studio were all considered, but I decided to take the photo shoot at a local area know as “the wastelands”, which is a dilapidated plot of land next to a council owned car park, I chose this location because its looks like it could have been in a post apocalyptic world & there are few people who go to that area who would interrupt the photo shoot.
Cover
Previous to having taken the photographs, I had begun to plan out what the magazine cover would look like, I had made two possible covers, of the two, I had chosen to use the latter, this is because it allowed me to have more information on the cover, whilst obscuring less of the cover image.
Layout
With the cover made, I then turned my attention to the layout of both the contents page & the main two page spread. With the contents page, I had various possible ideas, from designing it to look like a gig advertisement poster, to a more plain design (the one I chose) I chose this one because it would allow me to display a useful amount of information, but also have a pale image in the background, to add more flavour to the page. As for the main two page spread, I chose to have the text at the bottom of the page, as is the standard with most magazines, the image that I used spreads out across both pages of the spread, this ties the pages together & makes them flow better.
