EVALUATION

1) Who would be the audience for your media product? 

The audience for my magazine are lover of R&B music, both boys and girls. Ideally, my readers will be teenagers, as the lexis is simple, with high frequency words.

I have created a reader profile on my blog, which provides the information needed about my target audience. 
http://tonilouisee24.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/reader-profile.html



2) How did you attract/address your audience? 

I have used a simple colour scheme that consists of black, white, red, and yellow. These colours are not at all childish, but still fun, bright and bold. They can appeal to both males and females. 

This is very popular Pop music magazine. As you can see, a lot of bright pinks, blues and yellows have been used. This colour scheme will appeal mainly to females, as well as making the magazine look quite childish and colourful. 

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

R&B is a mainstream music genre, with artists that all share a similar look.

This is Chris brown. He is an extremely popular R&B artist that appears in many magazines every year, since he started his music career. His style of clothing is fluent throughout his photo shoots, as it is 'his look'. 

My model resembles Chris Brown, and I have tried to recreate his look and attitude in this photo. He appears to have a 'no care' attitude, like Chris Brown. He is also wearing a Snapback, which is a popular piece of clothing/accessory in the mainstream music industry. 

I have tried to create this mainstream look with all of my models in my magazine, with the 'no care' attitude and bold clothing/accessories. 

Kate's pose in this picture is very edgy and makes her look as though she has a lot of attitude. It also looks quite geeky in a sense, which emphasises the fact that she is trying to be unique and individual. 

The large, black glasses on Kate stand out in the photo, especially after editing for my front cover:

Where the photo has been changed to black and white, there are less colours for the eye to focus on, which helps us to focus mainly on the glasses and her eyes. 

4) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have used a number of different programmes and search engines throughout the process of constructing my magazine. 

Here are some that i have used:

• Blogger
• Google
• Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Hotmail
• Blackberry
• camera

I had never used Adobe Photoshop CS4 or Blogger before starting this media project. I found both programmes quite challenging.

     Adobe Photoshop CS4 was challenging because there are a large number of tools to use, and it requires a lot of skill to create a professional looking product. 

I used a number of tools on photoshop, such as the cropping tool, exposure, contrast, black & white, and many more which have been listed under my photoshop examples in my blog.

     Blogger was the programme i used the most during this project. I found it quite challenging to organise and upload some images, as you cannot copy and paste pictures onto your posts. 

During this project, I lost some work due to problems on Blogger, which created some issues, however I did the work again and it saved & updated. 

Putting aside the few problems I had with blogger, I think it is a really useful programme for this prject. It is much easier to organise the work I have done, rather than saving and printing several word documents.

     I used my Blackberry to send images of my magazine and production examples to my Hotmail Account. I found this easier, because i could then just download the images to my iMac. 

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

My magazine has features which are found in real media magazines such as barcodes, and advertisements for things like festivals. these help to add a sense of realism to my magazine, as they are needed to be marketed and sold.

    

My magazine challenges the forms and conventions of real media products by the content. I tried to keep my information and text to a minimum, because in my experience, having too much text in a magazine can sometimes be slightly overwhelming and gets quite boring. This theory obviously depends on what genre of magazine is being read and what the readers interests are. But my magazine is a music magazine, and most teenagers often pick up a magazine for the celebrity images and the genre of music. This is why I chose to use a large image on one side of my double page spread. This image could also be cut out to be used as a celebrity poster for a fan.

Although, another R&B magazine called Vibe also often use one large image in their double page spreads. This is what inspired me to do so.

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

I would like to my magazine to be very popular, and distributed as much as possible. 

IPC Media is the leading consumer magazine and digital publisher, in the United Kingdom. IPC Media publish a broad variety of magazines of different genres, such as gossip, teens, cooking, home & gardening, etc. 

NME is an extremely popular music magazine, which is published by IPC Media. It is a rock magazine, and reaches over 1.1 million music fans every week! In fact, it is the longest published, and most respected music weekly magazine in the world! 

I would like my music magazine to be published by IPC Media, because it is a well known, and extremely successful consumer magazine and digital publisher. However, my music magazine would be in competition with NME. 

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

Looking back at my preliminary task I have learnt alot about the structure and layout of a magazine. My preliminary magazine was not layed out like a proffessional magazine. It lacked information and sophistication.

My music magazine front cover has a barcode, where as on my preliminary task I did not include one. This is because I thought and researched deeper into music magazines, in order to progress and have a better outcome.

As you can see, my music magazine looks alot more sophisticatedf and proffessional, due to the variety of fonts and text sizes.

I used a similar colour scheme in both my magazines, using black background and red and white on top. In my music magazine I added yellow. I think the yellow brings out key features, and brightens up the page, as red and black are quite dark, bold colours.

I also edited the image on my music magazine, where as I did not edit the image on my preliminary task.
The image on my preliminary is extremely blurry and looks very ametuer, in comparison to my image on my music magazine. It is extremely clear and i have adjusted the exposure and contrast, as well as blurring the edges of the photo, to bring out the features of her face.

This is my preliminary magazine contents page.

It is extremely plain, and very dull to look at. It's not at all eye catching. I tried to achieve a look which fit with education, but I have not made it look exciting to read. A school magazine should look more fun and interesting, in order for the children to read it.

This is my music magazine contents page. It has alot more information than my preliminary contents page. When researching, I found that magazine contents pages often have quite a lot of information on them. I also found that the magazines normally have a generous amount of pages. I tried to use this in my contents page, by putting high page numbers.

I didn't use any yellow on my contents page, because i found that it was too bold, and there was too much to focus on. I kept it quite simple, but added large pictures to balance out the amount of text.