AS Media-Music Magazine Evaluation

By Thomas Curran

Front Cover

I chose to call my magazine Minimal is More as it is a contradicting statement. In the world of the Minimalist less is more and the genre of the music is minimalism hence the title.

For my front cover I wanted a relaxing simple front cover with not too much on to represent the genre of the magazine. In the end I went for a simple picture of a man standing in the clouds. This shows what the music advertised is about. The image of the clouds shows tranquillity which is good as the music its self is relaxing and tranquil.

Front Cover

I have chose the font style known as Optima as it is a nice easy to read relaxing font and is not too boring like Arial or Times New. It all fits in to the idea of Minimalist music.

Contents Page

My contents page like the front cover has a simple design which ties into the magazines minimalism genre. I have used the same font through out which is optima and I have also made the title the same as the one on the front cover. This keeps the magazine nice and consist so they all link together.

The picture I took also has the same sort of tranquil feeling of the picture I used for the front cover. It is a picture of the sun rising in winter with it reflecting off a modern building which is a nice contrast of natural beauty and man made buildings.

Contents Page

For the text title's I used different shades of blue and green as it adds a little bit of colour to what would be a quite bland grey, black and white page with just a load of text written on. However with those little bits of colour it makes the page look slightly more relaxing.

Double Page Spread

For my double page spread I chose to write an article on Ludovico Einaudi's latest Album Islands which is a huge collection of his best work. For the layout I wanted to keep it simple so that it still ties in to the Minimalism genre that the magazine is. Also Einaudi's work is Minimalism too so it keeps it nice and consistent.

I kept the font colour black for the text and grey for the title as it keeps it nice and simple and needed to be a simple colour that doesn't dazzle you when you read it. Also I wanted the page to have a slightly old fashion hint to it. The picture on the left was taken in a sepia tone to also add to the effect.

Forms and Conventions

My media product challenges the forms and conventions of real media products as there are very few (if any) magazines that are about minimalist music as it is a very obscure genre. Also the layout is very simple. If you look at a main stream classical music magazine like Classic FM it has tones of huge pieces of text, pictures and colour where as my one only has a few simple colours and a few pictures.

Here is an example of a front cover of the Classic FM magazine. As you can see it is quite different from the one I have done because although the genre is similar this one has a lot more on the page as classical music is a lot more complex then Minimalism, hence the difference.

Target Audience

The target audience of my magazine would be people from around 20 years of age to about 40 years. People who like to listen to relaxing music. Also people who play and instrument and like this sort of genre might be interested in reading a magazine like this. The target audience would mainly be people who like to listen to minimalism music it is hard to define a particular age group.