Evaluation

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

My magazine front cover uses many of the same forms and conventions that I discovered in my original research. The masthead stretches the width of the magazine and is in a large eye-catching font. With the mast head I also challenged my research, because in the majority of the student magazines that I found the masthead was in capital letters, most probably to reduce the ascenders and descenders. But for my magazine I felt that having the masthead was more appealing in lowercase. The main photograph takes up the whole of the A4 cover just like all the examples I found in my research. I used a sans serif font to stick with the intended audience profile and this was what was also used on other student magazines the i found. I used a callout in the form of a jigsaw piece which used and developed the conventions of real media products because i had found a callout in the magazine 'College Lifestyle' but i then developed this. Instead of having a plain circle with writing in, I decided to use a jigsaw piece which kept with the retro theme while it also served as a text box. For all the cover lines I used roughly the same font sizes that I found in my research. It is crucial to get the sizes of the fonts coordinating to the importance of the story, so the reader's eye is drawn right to the story that the writer intends. 

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for my magazine is college students. When creating the magazine front cover I made it look quite retro which could begin to attract a different type of audience. The magazine could now attract more radicals, people who want to be more individual and also hedonists - people who want to enjoy life now, also probably people at C1 on the Jicnar scale.

How did you attract/address  your audience?

I attracted the audience by keeping the retro feel consistent throughout the front cover. I used a pixelated font throughout the cover which connote the old fashioned retro look.

I also used bright colours of orange and yellow for the masthead and jigsaw pieces this gives a bright vibrant atmosphere to the front cover connoting a happy lively feel. When capturing the photograph for the background I knew I wanted it to be very colourful, that is why I chose the library because the books give a variety of bright colours for the background of the front cover, once again connoting the happy retro feel. For the rest of the text used on the page I used a a plain white colour, this reduces the colours making it more minimal and connotes and clean smooth line to the magazine. I also made the cover lines relevant to the target audience so to attract them into buying the magazine.

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

From creating the magazine front cover i know know how to use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign, both of these programs are not only consumer technology, they are also the programs that are used professionally in the magazine business.

In photoshop I learnt how to use the different layers effectively and how to use the magnetic lasso tool so part of the picture covers up the masthead. I also learnt how to use all of the simple manipulation tools eg. the move tool and the free transform tool. All of which you can find evidence of on real media products.

In InDesign I learnt how use the text wrap feature to have the text following the outline of the persons body. It was slightly harder than first thought because the picture wasn't on a white background i first had to create a separate layer in Photoshop. After I had worked this out the text wrap worked perfectly.

For this preliminary task the technology used was vital to secure a well structure, professional looking magazine. Without the technology it would have been much harder. Also before this sort of technology creating a magazine would have taken much longer and would have been much more of a challenge.

Using blogger really helped with this project because you could easily view and access and alter anything you wanted to. It was easy to view all you work so I could see straight away if i was missing anything and it was easy to set out your work in a way that anyone could read and understand it. It was also much easier to keep track of everything that I had learnt and when creating the magazine I could quickly look back at my planning to check that everything was going to plan.