Magazine Advert

Magazine Advert Characteristics

The final piece I had to create for my artist was a magazine advert. In order to do this, I first looked at some examples of magazine adverts for albums, and identified the characteristics that they shared so that I could apply them to my album artwork.

Plan B - The Defamation Of Strickland Banks

The first magazine advert I looked at was for an album distinguishing a huge change in style for rapper Plan B; a shift towards swing, pop and blues-influenced music, which makes it perfect to analyse in terms of comparing genres. It has a number of features which are easily identifiable - the first being the use of black-and-white photography, the second being a simple colour colour scheme (black, red and white), the third being the presence of the album artwork and the fourth being reviews of the album in question. These factors combine to create a simple, but powerful and effective advert.

Gwen Stefani - Love. Angel. Music. Baby.

The second advert I looked at came from an artist from a completely different genre to my own artist - hip-hop/pop. Stefani's advert is slightly different in the sense that the image of the artist it uses is from the album artwork, yet it has two characteristics which are similar to the previous advert - a simple colour scheme (gold and white), use of the album artwork in the corner and the prominent focus is the artist.

Jamie Cullum - Catching Tales

The final advert I looked at was from an advert from an artist in the same genre as my own - Jamie Cullum. This advert also has number of immediately identifiable features which can be seen in the other pieces of artwork - a simple colour scheme stemming from the album (red and white) with a predominant focus on the artist, with the shot of the artist being from the album cover.

Characteristics

From looking at these three examples, I was able to find the following common characteristics which will help me to create my own magazine advert.

• Simple colour scheme (often monochromatic or with one colour)
• Extension of the design of the album cover, such as the font 
• The album is either shown on a small scale or for the image of the artist

Magazine Advert Design

After looking at examples of magazine advertisements, I knew how I wanted my magazine advert to look. I knew which image I wanted to use for the background, because I had chosen not to use it for my digipak, but still wanted to use the image in some way because of the link it had with the artist. The image is taken from my music video and is shown below in the initial idea for my back cover of my digipak.

I then decided to use the same font that I had used on the digipak front cover, and used a very simple monochromatic colour scheme to continue the artistic stylisation of the digipak. The titles are big and bold, with the release date slightly smaller, to place emphasis upon the new artist being released. Finally, I added the front cover artwork in the corner to complete the advert, which is shown below.