Textual Analysis of Vibe Magazine

Denotation:
This magazine cover consists of a profile close up image of a man's face. it is a black and white image and we only see the males scarf and face in the picture, the background is white, which helps bring out the man's facial structure. In the image the man is looking away for the camera. The image fills up the whole cover page of the magazine. slightly above the man's forehead there is a title and just below that there is a special edition masthead of Vibe. There are only three colours used on this cover which are white, black and red. There is only one cover line on the cover page which is written in red and white bold font. Nothing else is visible on this page.

Masthead:
Vibe magazines masthead is very distinctive. It uses a sans serif font and the v is always slightly italic. The typetography is very bold and clean cut which connotes that the magazine is about bold and loud characters. The name vibe also connotes that it wants the audience to feed of a certain musical energy the magazine is trying to give off. This tells us that the target audience is people who like to listen to music and feed off of it's energy.

Character:
The model for the cover is famous American rapper 'Jay-Z'.

Composition:
He has been directed to pose in a very subtle way (turning away from us) but yet still looks quite angry/aggressive or unintrested. This just conforms to stereotypical male masculinity. He looks like he holds some type of authority in this photograph.

Costume:
Because this is a close up we can't really see any form of costume apart from the Louis Vitton scarf that is wrapped around his neck. This might have been chosen to show that his music can be relate able to everyone, be it simpletons or the wealthy kids.

Non-verbal communication:
His non verbal communication is quite cold and he looks a bit uninterested in the camera but more focused on something out of the shot.

Lighting:
There seems to be a lot of high key natural light as the photograph is in black and white to bring out a more subtle image.

Setting:
There is not much too see about the setting as we can only see a plain white background.

Cover Line:
There is only one visible cover line which relates to Jay-Z's accomplishments in his career. But they do not give too much detail away as to what the actual story behind the cover line is. The cover line still uses a sans serif font which shows that the editors of the magazine want everything to look uniformed and traditional to their well known masthead font. By just having one main cover line it may make readers more interested in just one story rather than other articles in the magazine.

Title:
The title above the masthead does however give readers a bit more information on what they will be reading and what they should expect to see in the magazine. 'Juice issue' may suggest that the magazine will be giving away all of the best gossip since it was first published 15 years ago.

Target Audience:
Taking all of these points into consideration, the target audience for this magazine seems to be urban 16-30 year old people, mainly men, as it explores the history of HIP-HOP and Rap in this issue.

Conventions Diagram.

This is a similar conventions diagram to the other two but this is from a Hip-Hop magazine. It's features are much simpler and it looks cleaner than the othe two but it doesn't give you enough information.

Conventions Diagram.

This is the second Conventions diagram I created using photoshop. This is of a different music magazine called 'Billboard' even though the feature are similar to the 'NME' magazine there are some slight differences which I have spotted and explained in the diagram.

Contents Convention.

This is a contents convention diagram that I made to help me understand the different parts of a magazine's contents page. This would help me understand more of what I need to do to layout my music magazine and give me an idea of what I could include on the page. 

Kerrang Front Cover

This is the Kerrang front cover used for my research.

Music Magazine Research

After completeing the front cover of the college magazine I then went onto doing research for my music magazine. It took me a while to figure out what type of magazine I wanted to to seeing as I like all kinds of music. But at the moment I was really into house and dubstep mixes, So I researched magazines like 'INDIE' and 'KERRANG' these are the images I found of their front covers. The Kerrang one will be posted on another page because I am not able to upload multiple pictures on one post. I then decided to start creating a mock draft of the music blog to get used to the layout and how to create the magazine. For this front cover I used the producer Jamie XX. It is not yet complete.

College Contents Page

This is my college magazine contents page.

College Magazine

My First peice of work for this course was creating a college magazine. For this we took up to three images each of some of our fellow students selected by the teacher to be our models. I took this image of my classmate. I then adjusted it by turning the image 90 degrees anti clockwise before uploading it onto Photoshop CS3 to edit it further. In photoshop I mainly used the text option to write the title, cover features and price of the magazine. I did however use the transforming tool to enlargen and center some of the text on the cover, I double clicked on the text layer to add colour and other features such as 'strock','drop shadow', 'inner shadow', inner glow' and 'outer glow'. After all of this I saved it as a .psd  file.

Introduction

07/11/2011

Hello, I'm Mpho Machaka and the reason why I have this blog is to keep a record of my Media Studies coursework at Christ The King Sixth Form College. I also study Photography, English Language and Literature and Government and Politics at this college.