Finished Magazine

Front Cover

Contents Page

Double Page Spread

Evaluation Question 1: How does your product develop, Use and challenging of conventions?

My music magazine titled ‘Top’ uses a lot of conventions of magazines of that genre, it is a Pop music magazine designed for the target audience of young female teenagers and preteens (from about ten to fourteen). When I started I looked at other magazine of the same genre and audience, such as ‘We love Pop’ and ‘Top of the Pops’; looking particularly at their use of colours, house style and image framing. I found a very nice example in an issue of ‘We love Pop’. Looking at their house style of bold and blocky red and yellow, which I wanted to try and replicate in my first mock ups. Then once I had the basic layout and colours decided I later began to change these colours in my next drafts into the bold pink and purples seen in the finished product, this new pink colour matched my models costume far better and would attract the target audience I created a lot better due to its connotations.

With my contents page I wanted to make something quite childish and playful, using the zigzag effect I created around my images did this perfectly. It got rid of the very plain and straight lines that would be used by adult magazines like Q, and instead made it very sharp and quirky. For colours I kept with the colour I had used on my Front Cover, to keep consistency throughout the magazine. Also when creating my contents I had to play attention to the page numbers, so make sure they did not clash and that page 23 for my double page spread was consistent throughout.

My product has developed a lot since its original draft, and between my first and second draft of my Front Cover I took into account a lot of my feedback from peers. The piece has been made a lot brighter and vibrant from using image manipulation. The layout looks a lot more professional, and the piece as a whole looks more polished and neater. Using my double page spread as an example, the introduction of a bi-line on the piece make the piece look far more conventional  and neat than when it did not have one. This and the lines added in behind make the page look more interesting and less plain. While still not going over the top and overcrowding the page.

Evaluation Question 2: How does your product show representation of particular social groups?

With my magazine being targeted towards young teenagers my use of colours and language show representations of this social group. The price of the magazine is relatively low for a monthly magazine; this is due to the target audience of teenagers. They would normally have no income other than pocket money or maybe helping parents or friends on weekends, meaning that they would not be able to always afford the magazine if it had a high price. With £3.49 it is very good with usual pocket money being around £10 a month now. The language I use in my magazine is kept simple and short, making it easy and quick to read, which means that teenagers could read it between doing other things, and would easily understand what is being said. The colour and very bright and attractive making the magazine looks interesting and eye catching, the connotations of the colours of yellow and pinks are quite childish and very feminine which would appeal to girl aged between 10-13 who would be listening to this kind of pop music.

        With the costumes the models are wearing there is nothing outrageous or unseen before. This is common amount the pop genre and idolises the artists and my audience of the magazine would see this and want to look like that as well. My main artist’s hair has been made to appear to have yellow tips to a dark blonde hair. This dyed hair is becoming more common among pop artists like Kate Perry and Miley Cyrus.

Evaluation Question 3: What type of institution would distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

At the start of the project I intended to make quite a mature Pop magazine for older teenagers, but as I began to research and create my piece I began to see how the audience of this sort of magazine was younger than my target audience. This is partly what lead to the be change between my first and second front cover draft, as the piece changed to be more appealing a a younger audience instead. As this was more conventional and made it easier for me to find Pop artists with this same target audience.

The target audience of my music magazine would be young teenagers who enjoy pop music. Around 10-14 year old. As research I gave questionnaires to people of this age and found that the girls found the magazine a lot more appealing that boys. This was how I hoped due to the artists I had put on the front cover and contents. Bands like 1Direction and Artists like Elyar Fox have the same target audience as my magazine is intended, so using these artists appeals to them. This was also the question I previously used to decide what sort of plugs to use on my front cover.

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Over the course of the project I have had to teach myself, experiment and find out how to use different technologies. This includes how to use adobe Photoshop for image manipulation, learning how to use some of the more obscure tools and effects. These tools are what I used in order to improve my images and make them look much more smooth and professional. I also had to learn how to use an Apple Mac as well because my college had a classroom full of them that I often had to use. I found this to be quite an awkward transition to begin with, but I learnt to use them smoothly and comfortably quite quick.

Within Photoshop one of the main things I had to learn quickly was the many selecting tools. Bellow are examples I had made to show them.

For me the next most important tool I learnt was the gradient tool. Though I had use things like this before, I had to be a lot more technical with how I used it this time. With my front cover I used quite a lot of the gradient tool, though it is not drastically noticeable because I keep the colours relatively similar, or let it fade into the background. 

From these examples you can see the variety the gradient tool has on Photoshop. This was next to me as previously I had only seen the linear gradient tool.This allowed for more variety on my contents page, when making my images' backgrounds.