Evaluation

Here is my magazine front cover next to the front cover of my style model 'Top Of The Pops' magazine. This makes it easier to see how I have followed the normal conventions of pop magazines as I have written below.

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

Overall, I think my magazine mostly does follow conventions, especially on appearance purposes. For example, I have used lots of doodle-like pictures such as love hearts on the front cover and lots of stars on the double page spread. If you look at magazines such as 'Top Of The Pops' - which is my style model - they often use doodles and cartoon-like pictures to fill in spaces on the page and generally make the page look slightly more over-top and perhaps even a bit cheesy, because this is how pop music tends to be stereotyped. Pop magazines are usually quite girly looking and are much more appealing to females, and I think that anybody looking at my magazine would easily be able to decode this. In addition to this, and once again in relation to 'Top Of The Pops' magazine, the titles on the front covers of both my magazine and 'Top Of The Pops' are fairly similar. This was not a form of copying, but simply the font that my target audience chose in the survey that I handed out. I also found a preferred colour scheme through the survey that I gave out, but I had to change this slightly because the colours didn't blend or go as well together on the pages as I had first thought, which caused my magazine to look incomplete. I have kept the background of my front cover and contents page white, which is common of a lot of magazines because it does not attract the attention away from the main focus of the main which should be the cover star. The only way in which my magazine has not followed the typical conventions of a pop magazine is the image I have chosen for the front cover of my magazine. You would normally find a close up of a celebrity's face on the front cover of a pop magazine, but I have chosen to use a full-body image of my celebrity leaning forwards towards the camera with her head slightly tilted. This gives the cover a fun edge and would perhaps make someone looking at it look twice because it looks a bit different to the norm.

Who would be the audience for your media product and how does your media product represent particular social groups?

Here is an example of someone who is likely to be a part of my target audience.

As you can see, my target audience are young girls between the ages of about 10 and 15.

They will still be at school and this is reflected within the image on my front cover and the images on my double page spread which consist of my model dressed in a school uniform. This represents her quite innocently and perhaps as being slightly naive because she is fresh out of school with little experience, which my target audience would be able to relate to. They are likely to have a general interest in music that is in the charts rather than any type of indie or folk style music. They are likely to be interested in anything that is fashionable and popular. For example, new fashion trends or new hairstyles or even certain television programmes.

Finding a specific target audience for my magazine was quite hard because through my research I discovered that pop magazines are declining and so they have a narrower spread of target audience. Less people tend to be interested in reading about music because they can just easily log onto the internet and find information and listen to the type of music they like. Therefore, the content of pop magazines has converted to something broader, including much less information about music and much more about fashion and celebrity relationships (as stated in previous posts). This means that the target audience of pop magazines is once again slightly broader, but there is still the worry about further decline.

Here is an example of someone who is not likely to be a part of my target audience:

It is clear that this person would not be a part of my target audience because he is not female and he is not between the ages of 9 and 15. He looks as if he would rather perhaps read a newspaper or a different magazine of his choice which have a target audience of middle-aged men.

How did you attract/address your audience?
Below is a short interview I carried out with a member of my target audience to find out her interests and what exactly it would be that would attract her to my magazine if she were to see it in a shop.

What kind of institute might distribute your media product and why?

My magazine is all about what is popular and fashionable, whether it be music or fashion or relationships (despite the magazine being described as a "pop" magazine) and so I think it is likely that it would be produced and distributed by a large institution which specialises in magazine production. For example, institutions such as 'BBC Magazines' which is the owner of 'Top Of The Pops' magazine or 'Bauer' which produces some of Britain's biggest selling magazines such as "TV Choice" and "Take A Break".
I think my magazine would be distributed to all of the main-stream stores that sell magazines such as Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury's (all large-chain supermarkets) as well as stores such as WHSmith and smaller newsagents.




What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this project?

During my preliminary task, I learnt how to use an advanced SLR camera to take some simple photos, but unfortunately, I did not have this camera to take the photos for my final product, so I just used a fairly basic digital camera. This seemed to work just as well as the SLR cameras though, and I was able to edit some of the photos I was unhappy with using Adobe Photoshop. Before I began this process I was totally unaware of how to use Photoshop, and although I am still no technical genius, I have a little more knowledge and was able to edit my pictures successfully in the exact way that I wanted to. As my main source of information, I used the internet, which provided me with a lot of useful facts, especially about the decline of pop magazines as well as allowing me to extract facts and figures from 'The National Readership Survey'.

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

Well, as I previously said, I have definitely learnt how to use computer programs such as Adobe Photoshop. For example, if I was given the preliminary task again, I would have used a totally different computer programme to make it. For the preliminary task I used Serif to make my pages, which I was really unfamiliar with, but for the main task of producing the music magazine, I used Microsoft Publisher because I am much more familiar with that and can use it confidently. I have also learnt that the magazine page is not going to look perfect in it's first draft form. For the pre-lim task, I only did one draft of each of the pages whereas I have done 3 or 4 drafts of my magazine pages for the main task. I feel as if I put a lot more effort into making my magazine look more professional for the main task, mainly due to having more time but also because I did so much more research into the make up of pop magazines and the particular font styles and image styles they use so that I could successfully follow conventions.

Final copies of front cover, contents page and double page spread.

Evaluation Ideas

For my evaluation, I have decided I want to combine several ideas to make the whole thing more interesting and interactive. I know that I definitely want to produce some sort of video but I'm not sure whether I want to make a video of one of my teachers talking about my magazine, or whether I want to video a member of my target audience whilst I interview them and gain some feedback about what they would expect from a magazine and what they think of the magazine I have produced. If I do decide to interview my teacher, then I will still include something about my target audience. For example, I could take a picture of a member of my target audience and then take a picture of someone who really wouldn't be my target audience. The only problem with having a video containing one of my teachers talking about my magazine is that neither of them are my target audience so it may not be relevant. Sayint this, they could just give some information about the make up of my magazine, the house style, whether it can be easily decoded and whether or not it follows conventions.
Alongside the videos and photos, I think I will probably include some bullet points answering the necessary questions for the evaluation just so that I can make sure I have the right amount of detail that an evaluation really needs.

Alterations to DPS

I have made the alterations to my double page spread that I said I would make on my last post, and now I just need some feedback from my teacher and my peers to see if they think it looks better or worse now than it did before.

Things to work on from feedback.

I have been through and looked at my work with my peers and a teacher and we have come to the conclusion that I should keep my front page and contents page as they are because they really represent and follow the main conventions of pop magazines. The thing that I need to work on now is my double page spread because there is something about it that doesn't look quite right. We couldn't actually pin point an exact aspect but we thought maybe the use of text box around each section of text is what is making the magazine look less professional. So I am going to try taking the text boxes and the purple colour away and perhaps putting the text in a brighter colour with just a white background to see how it looks. I have some concerns about having a plain white background, because this is what I had on my contents page and it just looked too plain and boring and not colourful enough for a pop magazine. I am willing to try this though and get more feedback when this is complete. If it does not look any better than it does now, then I will have to re-think and come up with another way of making the magazine look more professional and less like a magazine made by a student on Microsoft Publisher.

Changes to contents page.

Here are the changes I have made to my contents page. As I have previously said, I thought the contents page looked a lot plainer than it really should do and I thought I should may add some colour to the background or the text boxes, so that is what I have done and I think that it looks a lot better and resembles a pop magazine much more than it did before.

Further ideas...

I decided that I was going to leave my magazine construction alone for a few days and then come back to it because I often find that if I am working on something for too long I come to a dead end and can't come up with any other ideas. So now that I have come back to it, there are some considerations and extra ideas I need to take into account.

1. I think the contents page looks quite plain and bare because a lot of it is white, so I perhaps need to change the colour of part of the page (maybe the title? or just make the background a colour other than white).
2. The double page spread also looks slightly boring and perhaps not as "poppy" or bright as a double page spread from a pop magazine should do. The layout is fairly boring and again, there isn't a huge amount of colour, so this may be something else I need to change.

I am very happy with the interview I have created though because I think it addresses all of the topic areas that a professional pop magazine would, such as the relationships of the feature artist and her particular style. I have also made the interview so that there is information about how exactly she got into singing, and as you can see in previous posts I decided that my feature artist (Sally K) could have been a winner of a singing competition which is similar to The X-Factor. I chose to do this because The X-Factor mainly promotes pop acts and there is always a lot of reception to the show when there are especially young singers on there. So I thought this would help to stereotype pop culture.
I am also much more happy with my front cover than I was before when it had the grey bordering at the top rather than the purple bordering. I think the grey bordering gave it a kind of "newspaper-feel" which can often give off a boring vibe - especially to the target audience of a pop magazine who are young and are often much more interested in celebrities and pop culture than issues of the world. I am almost certain that the front cover I have now will go on to be my final front cover but I would like some feedback from my teachers and peers before I go on to decide that for definite. I just want them to make sure that I am definitely following a specific house style and that everything I have done is stereotypically "pop" and that I am going about following conventions in the right way.