DE LA FAL
DE LA FAL is an upcoming music magazine based in Falmouth, Cornwall and is a collaborative project between 5 journalists. GR!FF, founder of Mad Good, will act as editor to the magazine. It covers all local music and events, as well as a broader reach across the whole of the music industry. More down to earth than your average mag, you can expect the best interviews, features and reviews from it. This page will be kept up together with regular blog updates on the creation. Expected early 2014.
Blog Entry 1: 03/11/2013
Over the last couple of weeks, the concept for our music magazine has been born. Between myself, Meg, Alice, Jack and Kieran we have finally decided on a name; De La Fal. The magazine is to be more approachable than current music magazines and avoids the politics that often come with the music industry. We also noted that the only mainstream music magazines in the UK are focused on rock music; we decided to focus on a lot more urban music. We narrowed our target audience down to students and young adults between the ages of 16 and 28. We aim to include coverage of all music-based events going on in Falmouth and the surrounding areas, as well as include features and reviews of worldwide music. Our features are to be humorous, loosely based on the Vice/Noisey style of writing. Our team have all decided on what features we are to initially work on and I have been handed role of the editor.
Blog Entry 2: 16/11/2013
The deadline has passed for our first features and we all received good feedback and felt that our finished articles all reflected the ethos of the magazine. We now also have a much better idea of what the magazine is going to look like. We looked in particular at covers from Complex magazine and Dazed and Confused magazine and enjoyed the ones that were gray scale and used one other cold colour. We are now looking to incorporate that into the design of DE LA FAL. The inside design of the magazine is also coming along and as a collective we are now deciding what that should look like, including fonts.
Our logo.
We hosted another features conference and now all have a strong idea to take away and finalise for our next features. By next week we will also have page layouts to test.
Blog Entry 3: 01/12/2013
We have now completed a couple of features and reviews each and know between us pretty much every article we want to include in the magazine.We have also begun laying out our articles to look like a magazine, using the Adobe InDesign software. This being a new software to nearly all of us, it was a frustrating period, but after much work and time, we began to produce several fully designed pages. This included all the boring necessary stuff, such as size and style of fonts, margin sizes etc. Below are 3 sample pages from the magazine for one of our Falmouth-based features. This one was written and designed by myself.
The intro page to the feature
Double-page spread; the main body of the article.
Blog Entry 4: 06/12/2013
Between the 5 of us, we have been deliberating over our idea for the cover for a long time. We initially wanted to organise a photo shoot with an artist who is featured in our first issue. However, deadlines are fast approaching and we’ve decided to go back on ourselves. Without giving too much away, our cover will be simple and minimalist (which suits our initial idea anyway) and will feature a basic graphic along with our logo. Although at the moment t doesn’t sound very exciting, it has actually paid off and looks pretty awesome.
Blog Entry 5: 12/12/2013
With the Christmas holiday in effect, it will now be difficult for us to work together to produced material for DE LA FAL. However, we had a final features conference before leaving and know exactly what each other should be doing. When we return, we should have there, or there about, every thing written up that we shall need.
Also, we have decided to work with an outside collaborator to produce a poster for the magazine in the center fold. One of our illustrator friends (who’s work you can view here) has kindly lent her pencil to our cause, to draw up several characters we have imagined. They will be artists (such as Johnny Cash, Lil Wayne and James Blake), but incorporating a stupid pun within them (see below). Although the puns are lame, it’s a fun addition to the magazine and will increase audience interaction by having something they can take out of the magazine and keep.
A rough sketch of John Lemon.
Blog Entry 6: 09/01/2014
After the long Christmas break, our team is finally back working on the magazine. Having each submitted our portfolio of articles (including 2 features, 1 review, 1 news story and a layout plan), we now have the majority of the material for our magazine. We now enter the final stretch, with a week to complete all other tidbits and layout the entire magazine, as well as working on the media pack. Pressures on.
Blog Entry 7: 14/01/2014
DE LA FAL is finally complete. After a couple of days of blind panic spent in the library trying to finalise the entire thing, we’ve managed to pull together and do it. We have all worked hard to layout all our individual articles in a uniformed way, and as editor, I oversaw this process and put it all together into one InDesign document. This was the most stressful part of the module for me, mainly because of the pressure involved. However, I am now much more familiar with InDesign (event started to enjoy it a little bit) and putting it all together went a lot easier than I anticipated.
I am extremely pleased with the overall content of the magazine; a couple of us even managed to add extra material that wasn’t part of the compulsory portfolio. The design has also come off fantastically. At first we worried it was too plain, but with some added colour splashed around it looks great.
A couple of problems were encountered during the final stretch. I thought the poster we were going to include wasn’t going to make the deadline. However, Becky (our illustrator friend), pulled through at the last minute and gave the finished drawings to me the day before the deadline, We managed to get it in the middle of the mag and it looks great. It gives the magazine another element I thought it was going to miss.
One other problem came with our magazine cover. The quality of Kieran’s photo kept decreasing whenever we put it into InDesign. However, we managed to sort it sufficiently and just in case there was a problem, we attached the image within the media pack.
I’m relieved the magazine is finished. A lot of hard work went into it and I now just hope that it is received well.
Finally, here is part of the poster – Drake.
Mad Good Music 