EVALUATION

TOM CARTERCandidate Number: 3106Centre Number:54137Centre Name: Shebbear College

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

Noticeable Masthead, stands out stays with the colour

scheme of the whole magazine.

Cover lines, notice no main cover line

just all in equal size, not to take

Competition, which attracts the readers attention from the

Masthead to the bottom of the page.

Barcode and price, also showing what

month and year the magazine was

published .

Picture used is a dark style to fit in with the general theme of the

magazine, Model wearing black clothes

as a stereotypical metal band member

would wear.

Most interesting cover lines put in circles and most

attractive put in a star to signify that

it is very important.

Contents stick out to the reader in an attractive and

different font that hasn’t yet been seen

in the magazine

Attractive font to appeal to the

certain audience that will be reading

this specific magazine.

New/different stories that

wouldn’t have been in any

previous magazines to appeal to the

target audience and possibly even a different type of

audience.

Same model and

colour scheme as

on the front cover

to show continuity

and organisati

on Lots of different content within lots of different pages with the most important

being at the back of the magazine.

Attractive and interesting headline to appeal to the particular audience that the genre is targeting.

Interesting content with varied and different

questions, although

inspiration was taken

from Kerrang! when writing

this.

Included a website and a twitter account for our readers that would be more in touch with technology

A quick summary of the band and what they have accomplished in

their career.

Picture of the lead singer

from the band (The

interviewee)

Whist researching this genre of magazine, I researched magazine such as Decibel and Kerrang! and both of these magazines I discovered that this was the type of magazine I was aiming to make mine like.

After analysing many magazine I decided that the house style I liked best wasn’t anything like Kerrang! or Decibel it was a magazine that was actually a bit brighter and wasn’t the genre I was looking at to start off with but Q actually influenced me a lot.

I have decided to use three main colours in the magazine and that is red,black and yellow, the reason I used these three colours mainly in my magazine is because black is stereotypically associated with metal groups, red grabs the attention of the potential reader and yellow, because it is not very often seen in a metal magazine which is surprising.

For my Masthead, I went for a very impacting font and a very bright colour with a dark background to make sure that was the first thing that the potential readers saw before buying the magazine.

The cover lines used are all quite interesting but quite subtle, with the use of white on black with yellow as the page numbers, it makes sure that people will still be able to read them but not taking the attention away from the main picture of the masthead.

The picture I went for was just a single model as it is quite cliché having multiple people on the front cover of a metal/rock magazine.

2. What elements are used to construct the representations?

Text

Masthead is yellow and black, with a serif font to make the magazine seem

more confident

How does my media product represent social groups?

The cover lines used are all at one side of the page going down

which creates a certain type of

neatness for the front cover

Model wearing black in style clothing with a

snapback, also model is showing a gloomy yet

confident expression, but it is as if he doesn’t care

whether he is on the magazine front cover or

not, which may appeal to the majority of teenagers that read this magazine.

house style colours would appeal to audience because of the yellow which

makes it different to many other magazines of similar genre and style

Carrying on with the house style only the contents and the name of the magazine are in

yellow because that makes them stand out, there is also a lot of red on this page to also

make it stand out.

Only one model, which is the same as on the front

page, quite young and has a bit of fashion sense which

would appeal to the modern day fashionistas

For the content, i have made it black with the

numbers being in red so it is easier for the reader to find what they are looking for.

I also made the page numbers try to fit in with the house style because even if they are the most

important thing on the page they still may not be

what the reader is interested in.

Model portrayed in black and white to appeal to the more mature audiences,

also given a different person to

match his band name, Audiences may believe he is

mature because he is the spokesperson for the whole band

as mentioned underneath the

picture.

Masthead is different and big, this would appeal to my typical audience because ideally they would ruin anything for money, due to the fact they may be working for a low income and would dream of

having millions and millions. Content of magazine is

different and

interesting, not usually

what is read in

magazines such as

this, quite realistic answers from an

audience point of

view, has the

underdog sort of feel about the answers.

Website and twitter account is used to make sure the audience think the

magazine is up to date with the 21st century.

3. What kind of Media Institution would distribute your media product and why?

Text

Who publishes a magazine similar to mine?

What other products does IPC media and Bauer publishing produce?

Other Products?

As you can see from the previous slide that these two giants in media magazine publishing, produce many other magazines, including women weekly magazine, all different genre magazine and even magazines such as heat.

Why would a big institution choose my magazine?

A big institution may choose my magazine because it is quite similar to other magazines of its genre but the majority of the content is completely different and isn’t the same thing over and over again, it contains lots of different things such as backstage with different bands, stars and their cars and the venues which the bands may be performing at.

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

Different Audiences?

These types of magazine cover a whole load of different audiences ranging from a niche market with the metal magazine, to a colossus of a market with womans weekly magazines, they also make sure they’re not appealing to a specific type of audience such as the unemployed, they vary their magazine out to appeal to a mass audience.

What audience would my product appeal to?

The audience that my product would mainly appeal to would probably be the 16-30 year olds, mainly men due to the colour scheme and the majority of male content in the magazine, the type of person it would appeal to would be unemployed, part time employed or fully employed with a low income, very rarely would my magazine get sold to an upper class citizen.

Who would be the typical reader of my magazine?

I am 20 years old

I’m in a band

I am unemployed

I want to study music at

university

I like reading magazines

I use social networking a

lot

5. What attracted people to my magazine?

I believe that people may have been attracted to my magazine because mainly the masthead did stand out being in quite a bright colour and secondly there was an unusual competition at the bottom of the page to attract potential customers.

The colour scheme used is quite noticeable and attractive.

Model is wearing clothes which are stereotypically associated with metal bands and artists

Magazine looks as if it is a premium product that wouldn’t feel as if it was made out of paper like a children's magazine.

Attraction within Contents

• I tried to make the contents page as attractive as possible because that is really what people see second when they open the magazine.

• I only used yellow twice in the contents page to try and attract people with the house style.

• As you can also see I used red quite a lot because it matched with the “stars and their cars” picture which would make the potential audience more and more interested as they had to search for the correct page number.

• The content is all in black on a white background so it is very clear and easy for the reader to find, although at the bottom right hand corner the website is in red so it is memorable for the reader.

• In the middle of the page I have included “Insanity this week!” which shows the reader there is different content every week and it is all different from the previous week.

Attraction within the Double Page Spread.

• Although at first glance the double page spread doesn’t seem to be very attractive to the audience, I have made it appeal to the target audience.

• I have made sure that there is still some of the house style in there somewhere with the red bar at the bottom of the page and the yellow dotted around the screen in various places.

• I have included the logo for the band over the lead singers right shoulder so people can recognise the band.

• I have photo shopped everything out around the lead singer so the readers can focus on him and then read the content.

• I have made the title seem very interesting for people because it is quite odd that money would ruin someones career instead of make it better.

• The content is nicely spread out and not too crammed in.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

• I have never done anything magazine related before in my life so I tried to keep my techniques simple but still looking good and professional such as I didn’t use photoshop or anything to complicated.

• To edit my photos I mainly used the photo editing parts of pages and photos on my phone but I also used a photo editing app called aviary for all the little details that are in the photos.

• To do the different fonts and different effects with the words on the magazine I just used pages and a website to get different fonts off which were original and specific to what i wanted.

• I had never used blogger before I started doing media as well, so that was a different experience having to blog extensively!

Before

After

Cropping out backgrounds• This was one of the most difficult

obstacles I had to face when creating the magazine purely because I had never done it before and never thought I would need to, but for the magazine I really had to.

• I had to crop the background out of all the photos that I had taken then select the ones that I thought was correct for wherever in the magazine I would have to put them.

• For the front cover I had lots of different thoughts about the image I should use and I even swapped it around at the last minute because I thought it looked better.

• For the Contents page, I had to crop out a similar sort of image, this image I also changed at the last minute because I thought it looked a lot better on the contents page than the previous one.

• For the double page spread, I was always going to use this image because I had always thought it was the best one.

Images before cropping

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Progression • From the previous magazine I designed I believe, that I have come a long way, in the previous magazine on the front page, there was no sort of proper editing the photo and

there were bits and pieces all over the place, the same goes with the contents page, there

was structure to it, but no real sense of organisation. The photos were good quality

but there was nothing done to improve them.• On this new magazine that I have designed, I

have used all different techniques and asked lots of different types of people what they think to it and each different bit of advice I

have taken and tried to improve my magazine from each bit of advice for example the front

page, there is only one image on the front cover to keep the reader focused, but on the

contents page there are more images to interest the reader, and finally on the double

page spread, there is a huge amount of content for the readers to read. I have used photoshop to crop out the backgrounds and

improve image quality on this magazine also. I also researched other magazines of similar

genre to see how they designed their magazines.

Comparisons

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

• When looking back at my previous task and thinking that I used to think that something like that used to appeal to me and I used to be proud of my skills, when I designed that it now makes me think other wise.

• It has made me realise that just because I like it doesn’t mean that other people like it as well, for my music magazine, there have had to be some compromises due to some feedback that I received from people, although some of the compromises that I did, I did not like, I am still quite proud of the final outcome.

• When I see how far my photo editing has come from the previous task it is quite strange to think that I never actually did any editing apart from changing the opacity of photos, but now I change the contrast, saturation,shadows etc etc.