NEA: Introduction to NEA

The brief for the NEA project is to create a music magazine front cover and a double page spread based on the ‘artist’ featured. The product must be aimed at 14-18 year olds as well as include all of the magazine conventions required. The magazine should be based on a specific genre within music and loosely include the genre conventions.

One thing I am looking forward to about the project is being able to experiment with music magazine conventions, especially since it differs from our previous project of fashion magazines where I was not as knowledgeable in the fashion industry, where as I am more informed about music. I am also looking forward to creating cover lines in order to make my magazine look appealing by concentrating on the layout and different ways I can display the text (colours, size, boldness e.c.t).

One thing I am not looking forward to however is the audience research aspect of the project because unlike the last task where I was more open to exploring different types of fashion, with music I want to be able to explore one genre which may interfere what my desired audience would prefer. However, it would be exciting to see what kind of styles of music is listened to over this age group, even though genres I want to branch out to are already quite common in this region.

Something I hope to improve from my prelim is exploring more into the cover lines as I didn't look more into lifestyle articles and/or real life stories at the time. I would also want to work more on my masthead and fonts to adventure into unconventional fonts that would show a clear link to my genre and message behind my magazine.

My initial thoughts on what products I could create is either create a music magazine based on this generation's UK artists or based on hiphop/rap internationally. Either of these magazines would appeal to my target audience as these genres are common amongst this generation. Focusing on UK artists would bring in genres like rap, drill, grime and R&B, as well as local artists which would appeal to viewers of my magazine.