Magazine Advert Construction

To begin the advertisement we had to edit the photo so that it looks sharper, and more professional. To help do this we increased the contrast to +53 and the brightness to +7.  We edited the image so that it would have a brighter and clearer outcome, as the original photo has little colour due to the overcast weather and concrete of the London surroundings. The vibrance of the image was also adjusted, with it being increased to +15, this again makes the image look clearer, and also adds a deeper colour to the photo. The group feels that making these adjustments will in the long run improve the image’s outcome, as the colour is an important part to our ancillary tasks as they need to match so that the bands iconography is evident which will help promote the band.

Due to the fact of having the same photo for both the advert and digipak cover as a group we decided to use the same effects on this photo, which was to add a gradient of turquoise and orange, in the direction of top left to bottom right. This was completed by creating the gradient on the gradient options, and then dragging the tool line across the image. Once this was done the gradient wasn't that noticeable, so we decided to repeat this process to make the gradient visible enough to match this with the digipak.

We then added the title of Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds to the top of the advert, to start we had plain white text. This however, looked rather bland so Jay added two rectangle shapes behind it, with one being orange, and the slightly larger layer beneath turquoise, this helps follow the style as the same colours are used for the gradients. We opted to use the same font too which is bitume, this was to build on the house style and help it match the digipak. Once this was done Jay changed the colour of ‘High Flying Birds’ to turquoise and removed the layers behind, this was to make the title more unique and the group feel it works well for the advert. We then re-sized the text so that it was bold on the page, so that if the advert was printed the title would stand out and be easy for the audience to notice it advertises Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. 

 

Whilst researching magazine adverts we saw that the majority of adverts have some pull quotes from well established companies giving feedback on the album. We looked at the real Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds advert and copied the same quote Q magazine gave to the band’s album, this was done to make it more genuine. We used a similar, yet different font style which was called Hobo Std. We believe this font is suitable for the advert as it is easy to read, and has a similar style to Noel’s advert, which the group believes makes our own advert more professional.

The bottom of the advert looked very plain without text, so we decided to add some ratings from other companies to show what they thought of the album, this is seen in many other adverts as the audience may be persuaded to buy it if they see large corporations have listened to it and liked what they heard. We decided to follow the convention of Noel’s advert with the ratings from The Sun, Mojo, The Daily Mail and The Times. We chose to use these companies too as they are all reliable, and reach a huge range of people as different people read different media types from tabloid to quality newspapers. We then inserted more text, naming a few songs from the album, this would offer an incentive to our target audience as the included songs are already well known, which hopefully entices people to purchase the album. We then added a rectangle layer beneath the text, and reduced the opacity so that the text would be more attractive over the original photo.

The bottom of the page still had a whitish area, which looked really out of place on the advert. There we added a small black rectangle with around 90% opacity so that it blended with the current rectangle shape at the bottom. On this bar we decide to keep it simple as we did not want to over-crowd the page, we added the record company Sour Mash and a website fans can visit, we used these on the digipak so that the target audience can find where to go for more information on the band, and who produced the song. We then had the colours orange and turquoise so that the bottom text matched the title, as we had the gradient colours used previously. This makes the text slightly more visible but still subtle and not too bold, which we feel makes the advert more original as we do not want to have too much text which may bore the reader.