Music Magazine Evaluation
Within my media product I was asked to research, design, develop and create a music magazine. During this task I have used the typical forms and conventions of most other magazines. I have designed a cover that displays the usual features such as, Layout, House Style Colours, Mast Head, Main Cover Line, and Medium CU to CU image, Barcode and smaller Cover lines. I have also designed a contents page with listings and images from inside features. My double page spread has an image of the artist and an interview. I developed all of these key features in my own way to try and aim for a unique style for my genre of magazine. House magazine is very different from normal mainstream music. It stands out and is vibrant amongst other styles and this is the unique edge I have aimed to capture in my magazine. I feel my product is easily recognisable as a magazine and therefore is using the conventions and forms with my own style development. By having similar house style features from one page to another I am keeping the consistency from page to page. I used the convention of selecting house style colours to be featured in my product. Also I made sure that these colours were used consistently throughout my magazine. I think that by including predictable narrative features such as cover lines, contents page and a double page spread I have supported the use of usual magazine forms and conventions.
My own product represents a social group of young people which are made up of teenagers and students. Also people who enjoy good music, may have a slightly wild side and are keen for exclusive information. I believe I reflect my target audience and social group through both images and text. In my images I have used models that would be part of this particular social group, this then reflects all aspects of the group itself. By including an interview with a current popular artist with my target audience social group I have then appealed to my audiences music interests. As well as these elements I have made the magazine easy reading with a light amount of content. This reflects exactly what I believe my target audience desires, as opposed to pages and pages of meaningless content. I have broken a convention by using a strong almost scary looking image of a female on my front cover, which represents a challenge of the stereotype in the gender social group of females. This is because females are seen as girly and innocent so I have used a different approach. I represent social class through putting night life galleries; this is because I think middle class people would be interested in night life music orientated events. My magazine does not represent any particular ethnic group.
When researching media institutions to see which would be ideal for my product I came across IPC and I believe that this would be a suitable Publisher and Distributor for my music magazine. I have selected this institute because they also distribute NME which is a magazine who cover a wide range of music genres and target audiences. IPC media reaches over 26 million UK adults, which means a large amount of people would see my magazine in places like WH Smiths, Tesco and Asda. The reason I have chosen this distributor is because they are one of the leading media institutions in the UK and are very well known. This company would be able to offer advertisement options to make my magazine more established and marketable. An example of a different form of advertisement would be online on Web 2.0 with a promotional page for my magazine via a blog or Facebook.
My media product would be aimed at young groups of college and university students, these people like club and nightlife environments, they are interested in attending house music events and keen to keep up with the newest music material. The age group I have selected is 17-24 and I aimed for my magazine to be suitable for both male and female alike. I attracted my audience by making the front cover appealing to young people. I took into consideration that students do not want to spend too much money on a magazine that realistically is read once or twice and then disposed of. I used attractive dramatically different colours which appealed to both genders male with the green and female with the purple. I also made the content light, easy reading material. Students don’t need too much content, just the necessary informative amount.
I have used Photoshop for the most amount of creating this product, this has allowed me to develop my skills massively. Also, I have gained skills to do with uploading all my research and planning online via a blog. I have realised the differences in real like documents and how it appears on the blogger. Designing something on Photoshop and then printing it and deciding that this is not quite as you had hoped. Technology was changed so much over the past few years, the designing potential has changed to such a wide possibility. With the ability to make products look professional and exactly as you had designed. Also I have learnt how to upload images onto blogger which has allowed me to show progress step by step.
I feel that my designing skills have improved and my ability to work from my original designs throughout my work have been challenged greatly. This is because in my initial task I didn’t stick to my first drafts to the extent that I should have.
Whilst creating my magazine I have used many different forms of technology to ensure that I can make my product to the highest possible standard. I have used Photoshop, paint, eblogger, Microsoft word and internet explorer. I took some images for my magazine on my Panasonic Lumix and my second photographic session was taken with a Nikon. The majority of the editing and adjusting was done on Photoshop. My skills have improved dramatically in when comparing my preliminary task with my main task.
I used Microsoft word to write my main article for my magazine. I used the Blogger interface to upload my progress and products. This is because I thought this was the best way to present the progression of my product throughout the creating process. I used Internet explorer to do research about all different aspects of my product and any other products that are out there already on the market. Also used an email account to transfer images taken outside of college so that I could access them on my college network. During the process of producing my magazine, I have learned new techniques using all of the software I used.
When creating my front page I aimed to make it look different to any other magazine currently in the music magazine market. It has an edgy and unique feel to it and this is why I used bright colours to represent the genre of house music. My masthead is in the top left and is in a very bold font. I put it there because this was then using the conventional location of a masthead. It was really important to use a contrasting colour behind the masthead to make it stand out. I used a large font to make it stand out more in comparison to the cover lines because it is the most important bit of text on the page. By choosing to use one image on my front cover I have also used the conventions.
Gaining audience feedback was a key element of improving my magazine. I decided to create a questionnaire to ask people about the appearance of my magazine, how well they thought it would fit in on a magazine stand, whether they personally thought I had chosen the right house style colours for the genre, if my magazine would attract their attention on a stand, would they personally buy my magazine, which part of my magazine they liked the most and if they had the chance to change one element of it, what would it be. I think this covered all areas of the target audience opinions.
