Briony's AS media coursework.: blog 8/9 evalution of the finished magazine.

I decided to re-think my themes and ideas and came up with this. I feel it is very eyecatching and attractive and will bring in my target audience with a picture that is relative to them. My masthead was made using http://www.dafont.com/ however unfrotuneately, the font wouldn't save onto the local disk :/c drive and into windows and font. So I print screened the font with my masthead name and pasted it into paint. I saved it as a jpeg and placed it using the tool with the cross in the box and transformed it so that it would fit to the frame I had chose. I think the white background matches the picture and suits my theme of colours and it has a sense of formaility. In my original plan it looked nothing like this. I wanted it to look like a front cover of NME, but then i thought that it would resemble and look too similar to this, so I went for something basic but that still looks good. And unlike my preliminary magazine, i have decided to have my masthead going from left to right rather vertically. The font I have used for my masthead was called "illuminator" and I feel this was attractive as it looked like a glow stick being written on my wall. I feel that it is attractive to my target audience for poeple going to parties and gigs, the lifestyle of a raver! I decided to have only one main sell image with text as I felt it would look too busy I had more than one image for a main sell. The text used for the information to go with it was written in "impact" font using just the fonts saved onto windows originally. I didn't want to use downloaded font for everything as some of them didn't work and some were hard to read. i think they are more for things like titles, starts of paragraphs and mastheads. The text colour was in pink and font size 18. I thought this would be a good sized font as it is not the main focus of he magazine cover, the cover image and the cover text are.
I did the cover image text in the middle square to the left of the rule of thrirds grid as I felt that if people read the masthead from left to right, then they're eyes would be drawn to this information about the picture and would make more sense.

I used red, yellow and pink fonts in this main sell box as they are striking colours and suit my main cover well with the contrast of black and white and colour.

The strap lines font was just very basic "arial" as I didn't feel this needed to be in a bold font as it would look too bold and messy. I think it works well using striking and simple fonts and a contrast the lifestyles of my audience, the parties and the chillouts. fonts used: Illuminator. ChromosomLight, Impact, MTF Base Outline and Arial. I felt that the fonts I chose worked well together and I am very pleased how it turned out. I am very disappointed that when i went to export my file form indesign to pdf, the after shok font didn't locate back to the link so it didn't work on the fron cover of my magazine.

The photographs I have used I am happy with and did little touch up in photoshop on them. I feel that my text links to the photographs and overall looks great togehter.

In what ways does my media priduct use, develop or challenge formas and conventions of real media products?

I feel that my magazine is similar to many other rock/indie music magazines in newsagents etc. But I feel it stands out more as the contrat between black and whit and colour isn't used so much on front covers. However there are some, whilst reasearching I found one. It wasn't a music magazine and it wasn't British, so I think that it would definately stand out and draw myy attention from my intended audience. My magazine is black and white and colour and I have my Masthead at the top of my page horizontally all the way across. This magazine does not have this. the peron in the picture isn't making eye contact with the reader so in a way I feel I have created something exciting and different to what else is on the market, for my intended audience. I only found one music magazine intended for the sort of music taste for my audience. However there is no image of a person, just a black and white image. The masthead doesn't fit across the width of the page and similarly to the other magazine, only uses red as a colour.

I think my front cover stands out and looks exciting. neither magazine had strap lines and are not a conventional/ standard magazine layout. However when they were deciding to create their fornt cover they decided no to use the conventional ways as they may have wanted their's to stand out more.

However with my contents page, I have seen many of them in my reserchthat are similar to mine. I know that whilst I was researching, I had an idea of the layout but not really sure. I felt that if I chose a loyout similar to NME, my target audience would be more attracted as it is similar to the way it is set out. Howeveer I didn't copy everything and included a competition on this page which will intice the audience to read further into the magazine and want to know what the competition is with the navigator next to it. The contents page I have chosen uses conventional navigators and set it out in and ordered, organised way, similar to mine. However it uses more images than mine but it works well. I felt that if it looked simple, but with block colours with text and background, it could look just as attractive. I think it had, and using the same title on each page throughout the magazine will give a sense of formality to the magazine. It also acts as a navigator and I know that NME do this in their magazines. Similarly to my magazine, in main places where they intend for the audience to look, their page number (navigators) stand out from the normal body text so that people know where to go and what they are looking for.

My double page spread isn't the most conventional as the front cover image is nothing to do with the band I was writing about. It had a link because it was from the same gig, but it wasn't a band member. I think that this breaks away from the conventional assumption of how a magazine should look and what contents it has. I think by doing this I have inticed the audience even more by adding extra information around in places and makes it more interesting. I took the way in which I wrote my article from the analysed article in blog 7. I liked the ideas and style of the writing and I htought it fitted what the artist wanted to get across. The article I found about "the teenagers" was simialr to how I wanted it to look like in the beginning. It still is quite similar with one picture on one side. I haven't used any other pictures on the other page because I didn't have enough room. I wanted to but I feel that if i did it would look too busy and move too far away from what I was wrtiting about. Thhe image suits the article and I think it stands out as it is simple and informative about the band.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I don't feel that in any way my language used in the magazine represents a particular subb genre of people. I wanted it to suit everybody to attract a wider range of audience so not just my intended audience, but everybody would be able to understand the language and get involved with new music. I think that my imnages however definately relate and represent Indie fans, with pictures of bands, instruments and people at parties. the image of the band's logo is intended for everybody to have a lok at and I think people would find it humorous as it looks like the "Jedward" twins that everyboday loves to hate. I made a facebook group of my magazine and invited people that have the same tastes in music as I do so I know i would get both positive and negative feedback and how to improve it. It wasn't a success but I got a few comments form the sorts of people I had intended it for! I htink if I had made a myspce group of it it would have been more successful for people with an induvidual taste of music as it only intices a selective audience on new music.

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

I htink that only record specialist shops like Resident Music in Brighton ( http://www.resident-music.com/ ). This is for new upcoming bands in local areas where they sell their records to build a fan ase, advertise intimate gigs and sell lots of magazines. This is the sort of target audience I aimed my magazine for. I think

How did you attract/address the audience?

I looked on BlackBoard several months ago whilst I was researching about different people, media publications etc. And I came across Gough Yates. She focuses on diffferent meida institutions at how media and tv are addressed to their particular audience. One of her most recent one was studying women's magazines and how women think they need to be. I found this very interestng as I study communication and Culture and have leanrt that the way people say things people can interpret differently so when you are reading something/ or writing to someone or about somehting, it is very important that the mode of address reflects the target audience. I think that the communication within my main body text I wanted to communicate to my target audience through romantiscisingthe language and maiking it seem all the more exciting as to what the bands success story is like. These communications can be discerened in advertisements, which I think my advertisement on my contents page does very well as it is a competetion for free tickets to see a band that my target audience would really like.

Using thetheories of anchorage, I now that the image must connect with the text and the same applies to relay. I used semiotics in a pradigm form with the 'logo' of the band I decided to write about, on my contents page. It can be that if a person were to read the article, they would associate this logo with all sorts of things, depending on how they interpret the image and the text.

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

I found out that it was very hard to save my magazine as a pdf document with all of the links and fonts I had downloaded. If I went and clicked on fix links, it would delete my photoshopped image and all of the fonts, even on the same day. I found saving fonts as JPG im ages worked just as good and gave a better effect to how I wanted it to look anyway. Ifound it hard on the Adobe InDesign to make lines around things. I thought it was a bit like paint where you can draw things on or even photoshop, but I couldn't do this in the time I was picking up my skills in the software. I found it hard to find a starting point in terms of design and relaised my original flat pland don't really look anything like my finished product. However I am very pleased and happy with what I have made and the skills I have learned.

From my preliminary task, I have developed a more techhnical sense of style and design and changed may ideas in my main coursewrok. The preliminary task was very difficult considereing I only had to produce towo pages. However by picking up skills I found my main task not easy, but more easier than the first task. I like my music magazine more and it is defiately more attractive and appealing to my target audience, as my college magazine was aimed at the same target audience as my music magazine.

Over all I am very pleased however I wish I had been more organised with time and knew what I was doing from the start rather than swithching my ideas aruond.