Evaluation

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

• With my magazine front cover I tried to combine conventions and inspiration from existing magazines with originality from my own ideas. I feel I have done this successfully. To stick to conventions I have made use of the left third as a way of organising the copy and I have placed the masthead across the top of the page with my main cover line at the bottom of the page in a larger font than the rest of the cover lines. I have also composed my front cover image specifically so that the main focus point was visible with no cover lines in front of it. To subvert conventions I mixed colour with black and white (by use of editing on photoshop) this makes it different to all the front covers I have seen in my research whilst taking ideas from them about the actual content of the image. I feel it all comes together very well, particularly because the colours I used for the cover lines (black, white, red) link in with the colours in the image. 
• My double page spread sticks to the conventions of most magazines by using one large image but it varies slightly because the image is on the right-hand page whereas from my research I have found that most magazines will place the image on the left-hand page (for example NME does this).
• My contents page ended up being rather minimalistic with a simple layout: 'Contents', 'Euphoria' and 'December 2010' running across the top of the page (getting smaller in font size respectively), 'News', 'Features' and 'Reviews' running down the left side of the page, an image top-right with a caption, and finally a subscription section at the bottom-right. This could've been livened up considerably to make the page a lot more eye catching by use of colour, larger fonts and more pictures. However, in terms of existing magazines my contents page is fairly loyal to conventions its just a little basic.

2. How does your media product repesent particular social groups?

• My music magazines target age range is 16-24 so it does not address issues and stories which, for example, elderly people or young children would find interesting or indeed suitable. Based on my audience survey I have tried present 16-24 year olds in a positive light as people who mostly enjoy going to music festivals and gigs and whos favourite genre of music is rock.

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

•  My main inspiration for the design and content of my magazine was NME. NME are published by IPC Media so an organization like them would be a good company to work with as they already have experience with NME.

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

• Early on in the project I conducted an audience survey so based on this the target audience for my music magazine would be mostly male, aged 16-19 (extending up to 24 after I did further research), whos favourite music genre is rock/indie-rock (particular bands that came up as favourites were 30 Seconds to Mars, Muse, Biffy Clyro and Linkin Park)

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

• I used news and stories about the bands that I found were popular among people within the target age range.
• I used language that was appropriate to the audience.
• Because of the target audience I tried not to include extensive amounts of text.

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

• Although I already knew how to se photoshop, I had never before tried applying text to an image on photoshop. At first I found this rather difficult because of the many different layers overlapping etc and because it was so different from simply typing the text and placing it where you want on the page. When editing the front cover image I used the blur tool but when I overlayed the text onto the image I found that the text became blurred as well as the image, which is not what I wanted, this was another obstacle which slowed me down a fair bit (although later I discovered that it had a very simple solution of simply rearranging the order of the layers). I also improved my skills on Microsoft Publisher (particularly when creating my contents page). I ended up combining wor from Photoshop and Publisher to create my finished contents page which was alos something I'd never done before so it too was a considerably challenging task.

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

• At the beginning of the preliminary task I wasn't fully aware of just how much work there was going to be , so it was good that I had done the preliminary task because otherwise I would've still been unaware when it came to the final product.
• I was also partially unaware of the need for planning: in the preliminary task i rushed into it much too quickly without planning anything properly and then i ended up finding it difficult so by the time it got to starting the music magazine project I had begun to realise the importance of planning a bit better.