Evaluation Question 2 (Draft) - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Through the research of my magazine, I found that the target age group of my style of magazine revolves around 16+ male, and potentially female. On UK Tribes my Audience remain in the groups 'Skaters' and 'Young Alts' because of their desire to break away from what the word sees as 'Normal' for their age group. It is not very common for Skaters to be into mainstream music, and as such this fits my style almost perfectly, as it is not very often that Rock/ Pop Punk is classified as Mainstream amongst others.

Evaluation Question 1 (Draft) - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before starting the creation of my magazine, I had to research into the existing formats of magazine designs to take away some ideas and concepts to create my own idea. The Genre that I decided I wanted to follow was Rock/ Pop Punk, so my main focus revolved around Mojo and Kerrang, with a rather cluttered style to represent the style of music present.

The style that is exceptionally popular when it comes to this genre, more so in Kerrang is to have a rather large logo at the top, with a rendered image of a music artist that is made to cover some, and sometimes all, of the magazine name. It is very common for the layers to overlap, with other layers being on top of the magazine title other than the rendered image, to give a sense of depth. There is often a headline, which more often than not is the name of the artist, with a subtitle following afterwards that usually related to the story in which the artist is in.

Kerrang is particularly fond of red headers and footers, as seen in the example magazine I have shown; white text on red is very clear and easy to see in terms of contrast, so Kerrang like to use this style in order to make certain that the user can see what is included within the issue. The background is kept rather simple so that attention is not drawn away from the main image on the page; this technique is one that a lot of other magazines tend to take after too

When designing my final magazine, I waned to take some of the best ideas from the magazines I researched into, and add some of my own ideas to create a new product. My front cover conveyed the red header, whilst varying with the black footer; I thought that giving this contrast of Red above and Black below would allow for a much more graphically pleasing look, and am happy with the final result. Some variations of the Kerrang front cover use rotated objects to add into the cover image giving it a 'messy' type of style which is something that I used for my front cover; text is very common for this style, as used for my cover for the header and the sub header. My contents is rather similar to that of Kerrang with positioning, I followed the concept of using a black box header with yellow text on the inside, one of the strongest contrasts of colours to help keep a very bold and easily seen style of header. My Front Cover follows the 'F' Pattern.

A style that I decided to input was to add subtitles into the titles underneath each header; I used this to give more details into some of the page titles and make the page seem more filled than it would without them. For the subtitles I used a dark grey in order to make sure that the reader knows what they are meant to focus on first and what they are supposed to focus on next. When it came to the 'Album Reviews' and 'Interviews' I used a simple list in a font 4px bigger than the rest of the font, without any subtitles so that it stuck out amongst the rest of the page. There were other sections of the contents that I mixed together elements of Subtitled titles and Non-Subtitled titles to give a sense of contrast.

My double page spread was a hybrid of an interview and a story on the artist I chose. I rendered out the person in the picture I used for my page and changed the background to be a gradient of a Light Grey, and a slightly Darker Grey; the way this was done is very apparent, and easy to notice with the white text being placed upon a darker background and the black text placed onto a light background. I used a mix of white text and red text for the header because I felt this worked as a nice contrast, and kept the body of the text black, as this is a very common style used within Kerrang and Mojo.



 

Double Final

Final Contents

Final Front Cover

 

Draft

Magazine Prelim Evaluation

How does your Prelim represent particular social groups?

Generally the content of the magazine would be aimed at a particular school, due to how grading systems might vary around the country, or specific curriculum being slightly altered. Most of the time, a school magazine would not be made to reference a particular age group, and instead to focus on a school; I made reference to 'Antony' in my Prelim, which would be entirely meaningless if you did not know who Antony was in the first place.

Who would be the Intended audience for your product?

As my Prelim Magazine is a school magazine, it means that it would be aimed at the age group that are still at school; primary 16-18, as this is around the age that School Exams become a lot more frequent, and coursework becomes more regulatory. Post-16 could be the Age group you could put my Prelim's Target Audience in more specifically as Exams around this time become a lot more stressful in comparison to that of the previous years, and in most cases, students have left their current school to go to a new College and need some support getting through the first year of the new term.

A lot of the content referenced in my Prelim magazine revolves around exams and Ucas; for this reason I would say for definitely that my target audience revolves around students that are of this age group, for if a person of a younger age were to read the content within the pages, it would not make as much sense because they are not subjected to this set of information.

How did you attract/ address your audience?

In my Prelim, I tried to go for a very casual approach as if it was a Student that was talking to the Audience (Which in retrospect it actually is). The reason I decided to go for this form of language approach is because when a Student needs help with something, whether it be Exams, Revision or anything else, it would be more likely that they would want another Student to give help using the linguistic that they are most fond of.

As I am currently in the current year as my Target Age Group, it means I am able to use the correct language with little to no effort as it is literally how I speak regardless; this means that while writing the different components of my Prelim, I can easily succeed at trying to grab the attention of the correct Audience and hopefully, if this was a real magazine, purchase a copy of the Magazine itself.

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

In order to produce my Prelim I needed to have some basic Knowledge of Photoshop; I already had such knowledge from previous work I had to perform throughout my other subjects, and as such it meant I was able to produce my Prelim very easily. The main Aim for the final magazine is to try and produce a Professional looking final product that would look as if it would be found in a shop amongst the shelf of every other already successful magazines.

I had to create a logo that looked Semi-Professional; so I tried to experiment with a sort of 'Techno' font that gave an effect of distortion, whilst using a different font to keep the first half of the logo plain, so that I did not overuse the same font continuously. If I was to redo my Prelim, I would definitely not use the font that I used because I think that I did overuse it a little throughout my magazine.