Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My Music Magazine was very much based on DJ magazine; I think it really stands up to established music magazines such as DJ. I think the contents page is the strongest part of the magazine that I produced and is on a par with professional magazines. I did a lot of research into contents pages of music magazines and I feel that I successfully portrayed the basic layout of a music magazine contents page.
I think my double page spread is strong but not as good as some you see in certified magazines. Although my masthead is plain and simple I think it suits the front cover, it is bold and stands out like a masthead needs to do. I think if my magazine were a genuine published music magazine then the masthead would be easily recognisable, and may even stand out more than other music magazines in shops and it defiantly appeals to my target audience. I used a simple colour palette of black, blue, purple and green which has added to the effect of my front cover being simple but at the same time exceptionally eye-catching. On my double page spread I have used a big bold headline to attract the reader when they’re flicking through the pages also for the first page of double page spread I decided to use a full page image as I have seen this done in a few magazines, though it is not that common. I feel that this makes my magazine stand out, and on the second page of the double page spread the layout is under a question, answer layout making light reading for the target audience. I really liked this image as it shows the rebellious side of some of the people in the music industry.

2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Normally the lead image on the front cover will have the artist/artists maintaining eye contact with the reader I did not do this because I expect to capture the customers attention if you do something a little bit different to every other magazine.
Though I wanted to stick to the traditional conventions, after taking this photo I thought it suited my front cover well and it didn’t matter that the artist didn’t have eye contact, and so I worked this into trying to make my magazine a little bit different. I wanted a full length shot of the artist in a gig-type shoot.
I shot the photo at a gig and played around with the brightness of the image. I wanted the artist to be pictured as he would in a gig so the image would portray them accurately. By using this image of the front cover of my music magazine I wanted to portray a true picture of what the artist is like; serious and very hard working. The particular music genre that I have chosen and have researched in depth has a large audience who are seemingly ‘up for anything’ this means that whenever they can they will go out clubbing, it seems to be a reckless audience in terms of culture as seen by my double page spread DJ Tanya sipping on some Gordon’s Dry Gin.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Throughout the production of my music magazine I got a lot of inspiration from DJ. One of the biggest publishes in the UK is IPC, who publish DJ. IPC media is a leading UK consumer magazine publisher. IPC is owned by Time inc., the publishing division of Time Warner Inc. The business is spilt into five distinct publishing divisions: IPC connect, IPC inspire, IPC ignite, IPC Southbank and IPC TX. Alongside these is Marketforce, the UK’s leading magazine distribution business. IPC is one of the biggest magazine publishers in the UK and publishes DJ. Because my music magazine is very similar to the DJ I would choose IPC to publish it.

4) Who would be the audience for your product?

The audience that would be most interested in the magazine I have created will be 16-20 year olds, the music that my magazine is summarising and evaluating is listened to by most youths in that category, its where the lector genre gain most of their money, from club-goers in particular who are primarily in this group.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

I made it clear that the magazine that I was creating was an Electro magazine, it addressed information that had never been seen before so introducing stories as exclusive makes the audience feel like they are some of the first to know, I also attracted the audience by introducing a prize that you could only win by buying the magazine, putting this on the front cover and making the prize something that an electro lover would want to go to.

6) What has been the feedback from your audience?

This product was well received by its target market (16-20 year olds) but it has faced a lot of criticism from older generations, but this has created an adverse reaction in the target audience, the more the older generations don’t like the product the more teenagers like it. This has been very good for the publicity of the magazine.

7) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of construction?

I personally have learnt a lot about the technologies that I used to construct the media coursework, especially the program Microsoft image suite 2006, I used this throughout my whole coursework and learnt a lot about it, also I created a blog on the internet which was a valuable exercise because it is actually very useful to know how to do this because you can put information that you may need at a later date into the blog and go back to that blog from anywhere in the world.

8) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

I have learnt that it is better to have a quality feel to the magazine rather than filling it with useless information, I have also learnt that it is not hard to make something look how you want it to, manipulating photos is a very easy process and it is easy to make it look real too. Also if a picture comes out a different way to what you wanted it also means that you don’t have to just take another picture you can change it to look like something completely different

Contents Page

Last but surely not least, the contents page for me was the most time consuming part of the whole project, I say this because I spent more than half my time doing this. The reason I spent so much time on it is because I wanted to make sure that it appealed to my audience, and most of all looked really good. My contents page does have a lot of different sections so i had to make sure that all the levels were equal and all of them were colour co-ordinated just so that the text was readable above the background colour. This led to many changes during the creation of the contents page, some probably more necessary than other. I think that after all this hard work that it actually ended up turning out quite well, here it is:

Front Cover

After the completion of the double page spread, I wanted to have a go at the front cover. I found out that this took me a lot more time than the double page spread did because I wanted every detail to be right especially if it was going to be the thing that everyone made opinions on. This took a lot of work because I kept on printing it out, looking over it and deciding what I need to change and what I just need to relocate in terms of where it is on the page. Here is my front cover for my music magazine:

Double Page Spread

After all of this planning I felt as if I was ready to create the magazine front cover, double page spread and contents page so as to fit in with my target audience. To start I did my double page spread because I thought it would be the most work because of the amount of space that you have to full. I felt as though the best thing to fill up the whole page would be an interview with a DJ.

Here is my double page spread, the finished version:

A Little More Planning

There was just a little more planning I had to do to make sure I fully knew what I was doing when it came to the actual creation of my coursework so here is what I did:

Planning Process

This is the plan that I created, this is the actual start of project:

Some of the genres that I could do the magazine on are:

Rock
R&B
Soul
Pop
Reggae
Electronic
Heavy Metal
Blues
Dance
Rap
Drum and bass

I have researched all of these styles of music and I have narrowed it down to four of these genres. I did all my research on magforum, and the reason I have narrowed it down to these four is because there is a bigger market opening for these four genres. Right now there is a very wide variety of magazines that are covering a very wide range of music. I have studied the magazine ‘DJ’ and it has given me various ideas about how I am going to lay my magazine out. The layout of ‘DJ’ is quite packed, it is very colourful and the sizes of the fonts are all different. The Masthead would be made to be very bold and it would have to be very visible. Also the writing would be at an angle; this would attract people that listen to dance music because it should stand out and appeal to them. This is an example of the DJ magazine front cover.

These are four different things that I have to think about while creating the magazine cover, I want something like this front cover because it attracts peoples attention while keeping it completely uncluttered.

Masthead: This needs to be bold and colourful so it will attract the target audience that I am trying to make this magazine for. (16-20, shown by questionnaire).

Main Cover line: This needs to be the latest news about DJ’s so when a potential customer picks it up they will want to read more, it should have a good punch line so it will make them want to read on.

Cover lines: This should just be a small amount of information about the top 100 DJ mix’s in the charts or something along those lines.

Main image: This needs to be eye-catching and quite colourful, something that is trying to sum up electro. This image will be in the background and all the cover lines, main cover line and masthead will be in-front of this main image so the image must stand out.

R&B – I have chosen this genre as one of my final four because it seems to be right for the target audience that I want (14-19 year olds) I will design it so that the teenagers will be drawn towards it, mainly with headlines about certain artists and any new releases by well known R&B artists I would try to attract them with some explicit photos too.

Reggae – My target audience would be for 19-26 year olds, I would make the cover appealing to reggae fans by making it quite colourful with one or two headlines about artists but I would make sure to not make it cluttered. There are not many music magazines about reggae around so a reggae magazine should do very well because there is a lack of competition.

Dance – This would be targeted at 16-19 year olds, it would be bright, with quite bold colours, for example red and yellow. It would have various mixes from less known DJ’s and there would be headlines about certain performances of better known DJ’s. This market should be quite open because many people have recently been getting into more ‘dance’ music and it seems to be more popular than it used to be. The mast head would be done in lowercase to make it more informal so it would also attract more laid back people.

Heavy Metal – My target audience for this would be 15-29; this is a very large target audience so it would sell very well. The front cover would be darker, more gothic with hard hitting headlines. The font that I would use for it would be very bold and would stand out from the rest of the page.

After reviewing all the possible genres that I could make my magazine on I have chosen to do an electro magazine because there is hardly any competition on this type of music, meaning a huge opening in the market, I chose against an R&B magazine because there are so many in circulation that the competition would be far too high. The reggae magazine would not do as well as the electronic magazine because a lot less people listen to reggae music and the people that do aren’t the type of people that go shopping weekly to get a magazine. The reason I chose against a heavy metal magazine is similar to the reason I didn’t do it on R&B, there are a limited amount of people who listen to it and there are already lots of magazines about it. Also at the moment there has been a huge movement to club culture, and very few people have decided to make an electro magazine, the profit that could be made from being one of the first movers in this market could potentially be massive.

Front Cover Plan

· I want the price, issue number and date to be in the corner in quite bold writing and in a bright colour so it stands out, but also catches the customer’s attention.

· I am going to try and make it so that the masthead encroaches a little on the main image so it looks like it is meant to be part of the main image, and then I am going to make it so that the masthead has two very bright colours so it stands out from the main image, I am doing all this just to make it eye catching.


· The barcode is going to be something that may be considered quite random for example an animal with a barcode on it. I am going to do this because it adds an interest factor to the magazine, and it could also catch the attention of a potential customer for being a bit ‘wacky’.

· There will be three headlines and pictures next to all three so that this magazine does not just look like it is full of pictures but instead it is full of information that may be regarded useful by the customer.


· There will be two smaller pictures that kind of blend into the main image so I am going to have to colour code it right so they do not clash and looks quite ridiculous.

· The masthead will be at an angle, this is seen as more laid back and that is the sort of target audience I am going for.


Contents Page Plan

· There is going to be a bright background but I am going to have to put extra effort in to make sure that you can see the font in front of it, so it is very easy for the customer to navigate around the magazine.

· I may put a splash in the corner just to show that there is a competition on at the moment so no-one could miss it.


· The greatest reference to the double page spread, so DJ Tanya will be in the features section which will be on the left hand side underneath an image which should merge with the background of the features section.

· There may be some difference in colours in the actual text because it will be hard to make the words stand out because the background is so bright in some parts of the contents page.

· There will be a different picture that will be the background to each section



Double Page Spread Plan

· I want my double page spread to be fairly simple, with one large picture of the DJ that I am going to interview on one side and then the title of the interview and the actual interview.

· The page without the image on it is going to be as jam packed with questions as possible.


· I may make it that the colour changes whenever someone else speaks, I could also change the font between the interviewer and interviewee and possibly even change font. I will defiantly be decreasing the size of the interviewee’s font because she will be answering back with quite long answers so if we want as many questions as possible we will have to make her font smaller.

· The image is going to be used to shock the customers into buying the weekly edition of Electro Mag.

· I am going to make a large border around the whole double page spread because without it there will be too much blank it would seem like a waste of space.

Matt's First Front Cover

To begin with we were asked to create a front cover for the school magazine, each of us had different ideas at how to ensure to get as many marks as possible, my way of handling this was to try and blur pictures of the school and the people in it into the corners. This made the front cover look very open, and it isn't jam packed with writing or anything so no-one is put off. My outlook on the front cover is that is it showing that there is a lot of music and sport in the school and everyone is very happy here, also it is a very picturesque place to be educated.