Mixmag Double page spread analysis

Mixmag Front cover Analysis

Magazine Terminology

Buzz Words: "Wow", "Exclusive", "Free" are all examples of this. Puffs: Colorful boxes promoting features inside. House Style: A magazine's distinctive design that distinguishes it from its competitors. Strap Line: A slogan Banner: Text which stands out on a coloured background generally at the bottom of the magazine. Copy: The Main Story in the Magazine. Anchorage Text: The way in which text helps to pin down the meaning of a picture and vice versa. Pugs: Placed at the top left and right corners of the paper and are known as the 'ears' of the page. The price of the paper, the logo or a promotion are often positioned there. Motto: Memorable phrase that is recognisable to a brand Headline: Catchy Title for the main article Sell Lines: Text on the front cover that helps to sell the magazine to the audience. Caption: Description of the main image Masthead: Name of the magazine Lead: The introductory paragraph of an article. Usually written in bold or capitals. Drop Capitals: Really big letter that starts off an article. Bleed: The extension of an illustration beyond the type area to the edge of the page. Break of the Book: The allocation of space for articles, features, and all material printed in the book. Folio: The page number, date, and name of the periodical on each page or spread.

Magazine Analysis

Semiotics

Semiotics are involved in anything in media and it can be seen by making something more significant, which means it can be applied to everything which has meaning within perception. Even within mass media, you can analyse semiotics to any media, an example of this is Television, Films, Cartoons, Paper articles, Posters and many other ads that you can analyse using semiotics and also the practices that involve producing and interpreting such texts. The most common semiotic signs are: How they or something is communicating to the reader? What does it symbolize? What does it indicate? How they make us feel? Who are they designed for? and... Why are they designed?

Ideology

Ideology is the hidden message behind any media, for example, In beyonce's song 'If I was a boy' she trys to put out that male dominance overwhelms her feminism. These messages can also be shown throughout other styles of media for example images and music videos. All media texts reflect upon values or ideologies although sometimes people are not aware of this. Media is a successful carrier of ideology as it spreads out to such a wide audience. The study of Media allows people to consider different ideologies and look at dominance and implications of different styles of ideology and value systems. When studying a media text, people may look for the dominant ideology.

Mood Board

Here you can see my mood board, It features a lot of artists associated with dubstep and electronic music in general. The moodboard also features pictures from events such as Shambhala, which is what I plan to base my magazine on.

College Magazine

Here you can see my School Magazine Title page, this took me approximately 2 hours And involved using Adobe Photoshop, I Took all the images on the cover myself and edited each manually using Photoshop.

InDesign

Adobe InDesign is used alot in the magazine based media, indesign is used to create magazines, you can select columns in your text, chose where to place picture, have layers to have text over pictures and much more. In class, we used an article from an interview with Arctic monkeys' Alex Turner, we manipulated the text and photoshopped a photo of Alex Turner to make the image suitable for the article, this is shown below

Photoshop

Adobe photoshop CS5 is software which is made for photo editing however is used by pretty much everything in the media, the software allows users to add colour corrections, text, greyscale or even remove spots from photographs. In our recent lessons, we've been practicing using photoshop by removing spots from a photograph which is shown below Also, we're going to be using photshop soon to create our music magazine as well as indesign which i will cover in another post.

Femenism

In 1913, Emily Davidson jumped in front of a horse leading to her death in order to send a message regarding womens rights, since then women have earned more rights for example the right to vote. However, women in the media often perform regarding how they feel about their rights or against male dominance. An example of a song about male dominance could be beyonce's 'if i was a boy' in which she refers to how she would comfort women as the claims males don't. However, if you look at miley cyrus' recent music for example 'Wrecking ball' in which she rides a wrecking ball naked, she's basically objectifying herself and using her body to claim attention in my opinion, however other opinions may feel that she's showing a strong image in which she feels that she's proud of her body and she is flaunting herself to show her own dominance and that nobody can control her.

Anchorman 2

I Like this film trailer as it's the sequel to what probably is my favorite film to date, The trailer features the old characters and uses the same hilarious humor throughout the first film.

Introduction

Greetings! I'm Alex, i'm 16 and i'm from Liverpool, I am currently in year 12 (the first year of sixth form) and i am Studying IT Cambridge Tech, Health and social care, Business applied, and finally Media. I Chose Media as the subject interests me vastly, also i wanted to study it in GCSE however i had a conflict between another subject i wanted to take, but i've chosen to study it as an A-Level, I feel like media was a good choice as it goes along alot of my interests, for example, photography, editing and journalism. I Feel like Media will set me up with alot of potential further courses or Apprenticeships when combined with my other subjects, for example, IT Cambridge + Business and Media sound very interlinked to me. In the future, i feel like Media will not just offer me several opportunities for jobs and courses, however i feel like it could also be used as a Hobby, ie alot of the skills i'll learn will be used for just taking pictures, or editing them, which i currently do now I'm my free time. Nonetheless, that's the end of my introduction, farewell :) -Alex