Magazine Advert - Research and Planning

As we are working on the digipak we have some time to also do some research for the next ancillary task, the magazine advert. We are doing this as it will save time and it will allow us to create a closer synergy between our products (since we are doing both around the same time). As with any research, the first thing we had to do was to look into were existing products. We looked at some music magazines that we had from last year's project (Kerrang!, Q and NME) and searched the internet for examples. The following image shows a few of the examples that we found that were particularly useful for us:

From these and other covers some of the conventions of magazine adverts were made clear.

• Use of black and white is frequent and appropriate in many situations.
• Another colour can be added if it suits the particular image or album being shown.
• Large text is used to outline the album and band names (more than anything else).
• Icons and web addresses are added when appropriate and at the bottom of the page.
• The image dominates the page.
• The image that dominates the advert can be different to the front cover of the CD being advertised although an image of the CD can be added to the page.

These are our first designs for the magazine advert. We made the designs with close attention to the examples of existing adverts and featuring images that we already have. In keeping with the established forms and to synergise with our digipak, both of the adverts are planned to have a black background and include white text. The second idea will have a splash of red in the colour scheme as taken from the red of the guitar. Both adverts use large fonts to outline the band name and the album title, as well as an emboldened release date which does appear on the Bob Dylan advert shown above. In the second advert, the image dominates the page but in the first it is a bit small, this will probably be changed when we finalise the designs on photoshop.

We chose to use different shots from those we used on the digipak as they seemed more fitting but we also included an image of the digipak cover on the second advert.