Preliminary Task: Flat Plan

I have started to design a flat plan for my magazine front cover and contents page, my initial theme was for an 'urban' and 'edgy' display and representation of Hip Hop, but whilst going over the answers I had gotten in my survey and focus group I came to a conclusion that the magazine should look professional and 'classic', but still incorporate some urban features. At first, I created some sketches as to what I pictured the final proposal to look like and then researched well-known music magazines in an urban/hip-hop genre to get inspiration for what I should incorporate. I picked up on a few techniques that most magazine companies use on their front cover and combined it with my ideas, for example, the layout of the texts and features, typefaces (fonts), colours and model shots.

The flat plan of my front cover was inspired by two different music magazines; Billboard and Vibe. I researched the different and similar techniques they used and incorporated some in my work. Some of the techniques I used was 'dividers' to separate features by using ' + ' and ' __ '. Another technique I included was design layouts; the masthead is usually on the top, the feature on the left side or whatever side the model was facing, the barcode and pricing placed on the bottom left. Apart from the techniques I incorporated from other magazines, I also researched photographs of hip-hop artists for inspiration and wanted to experiment with light gels (different coloured lighting), and lastly, to make it appears legit and realistic I added social media icons along with a "Find more about us on..." and a "Limited edition" sticker. Whilst keeping up with my aesthetic, I constantly checked whether the font types I initially picked out would suit my page layout on Photoshop whilst creating drafts and came to a conclusion to use only 3 font types on my front cover page which consisted of Onyx (masthead), Haettenschweiler (features) and Century Gothic (other texts).

The flat plan of my contents page I intend on including the use of light gels, but with a pink and blue filter instead of red and yellow which will be used on my front cover. Upon contemplating layout approaches, I had researched and analysed a range of magazine contents styles to create a brief idea of what I wanted my final draft to look like. Initially, I wanted my features to take up the majority of the bottom half of the contents page, but after choosing the final picture I would use the layout did not compliment the pose, therefore I had to slightly alter my layout. The font type I intend on using is 'Century Gothic' as the text because it looks very professional and some of the music magazines I have been using as inspiration (Vibe and Billboard) also have a similar choice typeface and 'Haettenschweiler' for the features subheading because it was very bold and eye-catching.