International research

 After extensive local research, I expanded my research worldwide to gain inspiration from well established magazines such as Rolling Stone, Billboard and Under the Radar for my cover page design. In terms of content, the local magazines are more in line with what I would like to create, so I decided to stick to design inspiration from international magazines

What stood out to me most was the use of minimalistic design that was apparent in most of these magazine covers, as well as the use of color. The magazine covers utilize the colors in the background image in the text and this is something I would like to implement in my own work as well.

Audience research

 I conducted a questionnaire to establish my audience and be better informed of what kind of magazine to create.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSekMyAqNpIpRqxgUA8vPsOabYYTJ2ixkA_OG4PxJOs5Y0vq2w/viewform?usp=sf_link

Local magazine research

After much research, I settled on the idea of an entertainment magazine with a sub-genre of music. It is a magazine based in Africa which showcases talent, specifically of young people, of different avenues and also acts as a way to promote their creations by making the public aware of their existence. Since my focus is on music, I did research and found local music magazines that already exist in the market. Currently, there is  the existence of music blogs which act as online magazines. Below I will include the links for each. 

Tangaza magazine is closest to the kind of magazine I would like to make. It features artists from East Africa, specifically Kenya, and writes articles about their success but also includes updates about what kind of music is trending at the moment. Their target audience is mainly adults of ages 18-25 which is similar to the audience I would like to reach out to. The use of a website in my opinion is quite a good strategy seeing as the industry has changed and demand for physical magazines has fallen. This is is something I will take note of throughout my journey.

https://tangazamagazine.com/home?category=Diary

https://biggestkaka.co.ke/

Photoshop practice

 While making ourselves more familiar with Photoshop, we were tasked with a group assignment to learn the basic principles of the software. We were required to photoshop each other into our individual pictures as realistically as possible. My classmate and I decided to go the extra mile and make it into something similar to an album cover. It came out fairly realistic, but I will say that it was easier since the images were taken at the same background, using the same lighting