Magazine research, Big Smoke

My next magazine proved to be an ideal magazine for me, as it contained many adverts which do link to my artist's mixed genre, and aren't too complicated to do. The magazine is called 'Big Smoke', a new magazine which has featured UK rap artists such as Sway, Sincere, Giggs, Wiley and many more. It contains several interviews and adverts, aiming to keep you 'in the know', by showing new releases, and interviewing artists to keep you up to date with what's going on with them.

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The photography in this magazine is very good, as is shown in the image above, a side shot of the main artist in this issue's magazine, Mr Manuva.

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I could go for a graphic approach with my magazine advert, such as the two above. One focuses on a manipulated photo to include graphics which make it look more effective to the viewer, followed by the text below for the details of the album. The other includes graphics for the logo in large, with a splatter brush to make the background look less plain around the photos and small text. The graphic approach would possibly be the most time consuming, but I think that it becomes more simple and does work alot better than text or photo based adverts, for this artist anyway.

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The photographic approach can still be as effective as the graphical adverts, as shown in the image on the right of above. It is a simple picture of a man looking over at a city in the distance, which brings the representation of him waiting to go there, symbolising himself as the album, and the city as the public, i.e us. The grunge-type text works well with it too, as it shows us the genre of music that it is by the text only, without needing to focus on the image. The blue advert on the left is a mixture of graphic and photographic. It contains four photos of the artists layed out in a square box sorrounded by a blue stroke outline, with the logo in the middle. A simple way to lay out your images, but it looks professional as it is accompanied by their logo. As always with a graphic advert, there is details about the album as you need to explain the image above, unlike the image on the right.