The album that I based my double page spread on; The Crookes, Hold

Fast.

An early draft of my contents page made using Photoshop CS6

Media evaluation of my Magazine

Q1.) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My magazine shares a similar format of the masthead of the music magazine the New Musical Express (NME). Mine has a similar acronym Mad About Rock (M.A.R) I placed the Masthead in the top left hand corner of the page, similar to the conventions of other music magazines, namely the NME. The challenge was with the front cover. I only put the ‘front man’ of the band on the front cover because the intention was to surprise the reader when they turned to the double page spread and contents page; to see that the full band was featured in the magazine. In my research and planning I used a mid shot like the one on the front cover I analysed. This was to

My double page spread was based off an album cover and was an original idea, yet I still used typical double page spread conventions such as including quotes, having the text split into columns, showing a distinct page split, showing page numbers etc. I did this because I couldn’t decide how to layout my double page spreads and went through a few drafts

before I decided on my final one.

I same applies to my contents page; I went through several drafts before I decided on the final one. When I eventually did, I used conventions of typical music contents pages. I kept the written content on one side of the page and the images on the other side, in order to make the page seem less cluttered and more coherent to the reader. When I analysed the NME I noticed that there was a lack of female artists. So to break away from that typical convention, I decided to add a female artist in my

contents page.

Q2.) How does your media product represent a particular social group?

My target audience was for lovers of guitar and its genres (Primarily indie rock, rock and alternative) stereotypically guitar music is seen as quite a ‘heavy’ of music and I expressed this through the fonts I used. The fonts were generally quite ‘aggressive’ as well as being distorted and squashed. This was so I could relate the genre of rock and its audience to my magazine. I got all of my fonts from www.Dafont.com, a website that specialises in

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Artists such as the Beatles and Miles Kane were famous for their sharp dress sense as well as their

music

As well as offering subscriptions, magazines such as the NME,

Kerrang and Q offer other promotional products to encourage

readers to subscribe

Media evaluation of my Magazine

providing user-made fonts for any written piece. In order to address my audience (apart from the fonts I used) I included images and features on guitars as well as interviews with famous, current guitar bands such as ‘Foo Fighters’ and ‘The Strokes’ that were placed on the front page to grab the interest of my intended audience, since I think these are bands that they would enjoy. My magazine mainly had young artists appeal to my young audience. As a result, I think I’ve potentially alienated older people (say within the age bracket of 30+) . With the music genre I have chosen it would typically exclude females, when compared to pop music. Yet as mentioned previously,

I’ve attempted to reach a female audience by adding a female artist to the contents page.

When dressing my artists, I generally stuck with a smartly dressed band for my main artist ‘WunderLust’. This is to go against the convention that all rock bands wear skinny jeans, converse etc (to be related back to bands/artist such as the Beatles and Miles Kane)

Q3.) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

After researching all the publications, I’ve decided that I would publish my magazine under Harris publishing. This is because they don’t publish a guitar music magazine at the moment (they did; Guitar world but they sold the rights to Future US) and all of their other music

magazines are rap and electronic music. I feel that a gap needs to be filled as the diversity of the magazines is quite small. I think that my audience of young, guitar-loving bands would fill the void and fit well with the young audiences that are attracted to the other music magazines. As a result I think Harris publication could reap significant financial revenue from my magazine.

I would want to stick to typical music conventions and encourage subscriptions, like what the NME, Kerrang, Q magazines do. I would also offer additional items to tempt readers to subscribe. Since the magazine would be published on a weekly basis, I would offer

products that are currant with the main artists of each weekly issue. For example, with ‘WunderLust’ I would include an early EP or demo tracks etc. Then it would change next week and so on.

In terms of distribution, I would want my magazine to be sold in guitar music record shops such as Rough Trade (http://www.roughtraderecords.com/) because I think this would directly appeal to my target audience in a place where the same kind of music would be sold. Therefore I would hit directly with my

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Media evaluation of my Magazine

target audience Yet I think that publishing solely in record stores would be to niche so I would also distribute my magazine in newsagents, corner shop’s and supermarkets to reach a much broader intended audience.

Q4.) Who would be the target audience for your media product?

My target audience for my magazine would be fans of guitar music and rock bands specifically artists such as Foo Fighters, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes Biffy Clyro etc. Some of my audience would play/have a keen interest in guitar since I included a section in my contents page called ‘rocking riffs’. In comparison to other magazine audiences, mine would be a mix of NME and Total Guitar audience, specifically the bands of the NME and the guitar playing audience of the total guitar magazine.

Q5.) How did you attract/address your audience?

The cover lines I used I mentioned quotes that would interest fans of those bands. For example, I said that Arctic Monkeys were set to release a new ‘heavier’ album and talking about The Strokes upcoming album. All of these cover lines/features are written from a fans perspective (me because I’m a fan of the bands I’ve included) so I think that these lines would excite and encourage my target audience to read my magazine. For my front page and double page spread I used a black and white filter because I took inspiration from an NME front cover:

When I took the image I was adjusting contrasts, filters etc and I decided that it would look best if it was in black and white. I also thought that the black and white would look good with my red, white and blue house style for my magazine. For my double page spread I decided to stick to the black and white filter because a convention of music magazines is for there to be some kind of link (photo wise) between the front page artist and the featured article. Plus as previously mentioned I took inspiration from an album cover that had a black and white filter on it.

The language I used was of pretty low register because I think that if it were high it would alienate my young target audience

I used four different fonts from dafont.com. These were:

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* *The images are the name and the

example of the font

Below is the original image and below that is the same image but

then cropped, rotated etc and added to my contents page

Image of an artist used in my double page spread. I implemented a black and white filter, cropped

and enlarge the image as well.

Media evaluation of my Magazine

The fonts I selected are quite distorted and unclear. This is was to attract an audience of rock-music-lovers because it shows conventions with other exclusively rock music magazines such as Kerrang! The importance of getting the right font is critical because it’s one of the first features that helps initially attract the target audience. If I had picked fonts that were much more clean and elegant, the intended audience may have dismissed it as a music magazine for a different genre and gone to something else.

I used young artists throughout my magazine to relate to my young target audience; otherwise it could be dismissed by them.

Q6.) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The whole creation for this product was done in Photoshop CS5 which was a technology that I have previously used. Despite this I had a very limited knowledge of how to use it. I knew basics such as adjusting the dimensions of an image, changing the colour of text and backgrounds and adding new fonts that had been taken off other sites (such as Dafont) and I knew how to add shapes. I think that with Photoshop it was a program that had the potential to do everything I wanted it to do-the only thing lacking was my knowledge. I think it’s a daunting program that seems very complicated to exploit to its fullest potential unless you know how to use it. However I did learn how to do some things. For example I learnt how to put a black and white filter on pictures (image/ mode /grayscale) and how

to crop out images. To do this you click on the crop tool and highlighted the part of the image that I wanted. This would allow me to remove

bits of excess images that I didn’t need.

Q7.) Looking back at the preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to a full product?

Preliminary task

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Above is an example of an old draft of my double page spread, made on Photoshop

Media evaluation of my Magazine

With the task not many creative or micro decisions were needed. For example the house style of blue and yellow was based off the colours for my school to make it more relatable to students. My front cover picture of a student working and smiling was to connote that the school is happy and productive. In terms of time management I got this done at fairly quick pace because I wanted to spend as much time on the main task as possible in judging the success of the task, I think that I was done to a fairly good standard but could be improved by adding smaller text boxes around the text to give the front cover more ‘space’.

There weren’t any problems with the task as it was fairly basic and simple to do. In regards to props I used well dressed actors to give a sense that the school’s students have high/well maintained standards.

Main Task

I decided that when it came rot the actual production piece I decided to ignore the design drafts I created earlier. This was because I felt they were too similar to conventions of media music magazines. I felt it would be more creative if my project had more original ideas and only developed smaller media conventions. In this task I did come across some creative problems. The first was that when I was first making my double page spread I wasn’t happy with it because I thought it looked nothing like my front page (which I was happy with and had no problems) plus I thought that the image layout didn’t look the same and it was difficult to identify a page break. I also wanted to include a subtle media convention; the costume changes from the artist on the front page to something different on the double page spread.

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