I chose this magazine to do my demographic on an I challeneged the conventions of the this magazine by making the person on the front young, to appeal to an younger audience. My magazine will appeal more to teenagers and to people who like music in general. Also, for funky people who like fashion and the new trends as it will have certain pages in which will be based on new trends. My magazine reader will also be up to date in technology and will probably have the latest phone or iPod (Won't be more than 6 months old)
The median age of The Lick magazine reader is 17 -63% female and 37% male and they tend to be single and urban.
They don't have a lot of money coming in and most of the money is due to EMA. This EMA would usualy go towards:
# Food
# Clothes
# Tunes
# The latest mobile and MP3 player
Most of the readers (73%) will still probably be in full time education and will still be living with parents/guardians.
Friday, 2 April 2010
Saturday, 20 March 2010
Evaluation
Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
One typical convention I used for my magazine was making the masthead go across the top of my magazine.
I felt that when you go into a shop to buy magazine, the first place you look, is at the top to see what the title of the magazine is, so, by doing this, I gave into the typical magazine structure. I also made the topics in which are going to be discussed in the magazine run down each side which is something you see on an average magazine.
Also, notice that most of my topics are in different fonts and sizes along the side, I also used this convention from other magazines and I thought by doing this would make it more attractive to readers as having all the things on the front page in the same font and colour would be a bit boring and wouldn’t attract many people.
I tried to use as many different fonts and different colours for my front cover, but also to make it look realistic, not over done. I announced the usual things that are announced on front covers such as competitions and free posters on the front cover to make it appeal more to the audience. I tried to develop the free poster aspect part more by giving a little sneak preview of the poster that will be inside on the top left hand corner. I also developed my own competition award with the “Polaroid experience”
By doing this, I gave the reader an insight into the competition and gave them a choice as to whether whey want to buy the magazine and enter the competition and making the competition appeal to them.
Also, by using a medium close up of my model for the front cover, I am also giving into a typical magazine convention.
Q2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I tried to make my music magazine focus on Indie music alone but with doing so, I realized that it may not appeal to everybody’s sense of style, so with this is mind, I tried to add more genres into the magazine also adding pop and R’n’B to the magazine. I wanted my magazine to appeal to everyone’s age range but because my magazine is fairly colourful and has a teenager on the front, I thought that maybe, it may not appeal to people above the age of 21. Also, a mixture of different colours would appeal to teenagers more than to adults as it is proven that people from the age of 1-21 tend to be attracted to colourful things. I wanted to make my model look calm and approachable. Not too angry looking like other rappers so I made him look to the side for this shot and straightened out any facial lines that made him look angry or stressed using the spot-healing tool to take away any unwanted lines that made him look older than he actually was; photo manipulation.
I dressed my model in a way in which I know teenagers in society now dress. Very colourful and sightly un-coordinated.
I chose what he wore for this shoot because I based his costume around the background scenery as I went to South Bank (The place in which I took the photos) before I took the photos to see whwere exactly I could take it and what style I could take it in. By his hoodie being up, I feel that that reflects the modern 21st century teenager and also depicts normallity within his status, as although he is famous, he still does things that average teenagers do, for example, putting his hood up.
Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
If I was to pick one publishing house to publish my magazine, I would choose
IPC publishing house as they don’t do any other magazines that are similar to mine and I reckon it would be good to distribute this amongst other media magazines in this company. I think that they would publish my magazine as it has nothing to do with magazines that they already distribute and it is a different magazine that will appeal to younger audiences, even younger audiences than NME appeals to. Also, my magazine is an all genre magazine and IPC do not have this. It would be a good addition to the range as I feel that it would stretch further to appeal to all races and ethnicities. I would definitely encourage subscription to my magazine as subscription will increase the popularity and guarantee’s that the magazine is read by at least one person every week. I would want them to be distributed in WHSmiths, corner shops and news agents and by it being sold everywhere would boost popularity and would cause a buzz around the item.
First of all, I would try to distribute my magazine for free to see if it does well then if it does do well then I will put a price to it and sell it for a price between £2.00-4.00.
So distributing it free would mean I would give it to local stores, youth clubs, new agents and colleges and have them to a small survey to see how well it is selling. If it is doing very well then the price may be a little higher than expected and hopefully, even with a price, it might sell well.
Q4.Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for my media magazine primarily would be teenagers although I do think that some adults that like the genres in my magazine may be interesting and may want to purchase it. My target audience initially was all ages but I soon realized (after production of my magazine) that it may only suit the younger generation due to it’s content of modern music and young celebrities. Whilst doing my audience research although most teenagers wanted the magazine, I didn’t want it to be one sided so I tried to base my magazine on everything that I thought would attract the older generations. This didn’t go too well as when I asked some general people after the production of my magazine, they said that my magazine looked as if it was aimed towards 11-19 year olds. Although my magazine may be targeted in the direction of children/teenagers, it would still appeal to adults who like the genre of music that it will include, as music is music and whether the magazine is aimed for adults or not, they will still find some use in the information that may be posted about current music and artists.
Q5. How did you attract/adress your audience?
I used mainly colours and different types of font to attract my audience to my front cover and also I feel that my background image attracted people as my model is standing in an area with a lot of graffiti around him. I also think that my use of various fonts to change the subject and to announce things on my front cover will attract people to my magazine.
I used Standard English on my magazine as if I used slang, it would limit who my magazine would appeal to and I didn’t want that so by using standard English in which everyone can understand, I feel it widened out my opportunity of sales and popularity for my magazine. I used a friendly tone and it was also most as if I wanted the reader to feel as if a woman was reading out the magazine to them by using calm language and calm tone. I also wanted to make it seem as if the reader was interacting with the editor of the magazine and by doing this I feel that it allows the reader to form a relationship with the magazine. It also allows peace of mind when reading the magazine.
I didn’t mention particular places myself, but I mentioned South Bank in the tone of Jaycee, the person in whom I was interviewing. I mentioned it as a caption of one of the Polaroid pictures as I thought by doing this gives the magazine a more realistic appeal. Also, it would have made sense to do so because South Bank is known for its amazing art scenes, one being the place in which we took the photos for the magazine, the skating rink.
I felt that selecting the right kind of font for my magazine was important as if you use a certain type of font, for example using Tines New Roman, can make things seem serious of gloomy. So for my magazine, I tried using less serious looking fonts. I sued fonts in which I feel would look good on a front cover and would reflect how I would want my reader to feel whilst reading the magazine, which is happy and jolly, so with his in mind, I chose fonts in which I know are good to the eye. For example the font that I used for my artist's name:
I also used a variety of bright colours on top of these fonts to give my magazine that, feel good factor.
The hoodie factor of my magazine front cover gives the reader a sense of feeling as if they are part of society as hoodie’s often depict bad behavior but in this case, the main model on the front cover has achieved good things; even with his hoodie up. It gets rid of that stereotype of teenagers and hoodies in society. I also chose an attractive model as I felt that by choosing someone that is good eye candy, would attract people to the front cover. In this case, the model is a boy so this would probably attract females more.
Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In my photography process, I used the flash of my camera and put it on the setting “Night” as it was dark when I took my photos, so by doing that I made the image a little bit brighter. I used the camera from many different angles and directions pointing at my model as I wanted to experiment and didn’t want to stick to the typical conventions of face-on photography.
I learnt a lot about how to use Photoshop for a start and I feel that this task has helped me expand my knowledge of how to use Photoshop. I used plenty of different tools in photoshop and by doing this, I managed to change a lot of things that I didn’t want in my magazine. Like for example, my model had red eyes and I used the red eye tool to remove his red eye so it went from red to brown. I was very happy that I managed to change that.
I didn't need to use that many tools as I planned out what I wanted to do to my maagzine and the background of my magazine was intentionally like that so I didn't need to cut out my main person or use the magic lasoo or anything like that.
Mostly, I used the shapes tool and the text tool for my magazine as I used plenty of different shapes to help form a template for my magazine as seen in my double page spread.
With all this technology at hand, I feel they helped form my magazine quite well. They aided my magazine production.
Q7. Looking back at the preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to a full product?
I feel that I approached both tasks equally and I’ve managed them both well aswell. I managed to gather up my models for both in no time and also managed my time well for both projects. I have managed to finish my evaluation and my research on time for my main task and I feel that with this time management in place, I have given myself some time to check through things in which I am not too confident with. I think that my success came mostly from the amount of time it took me to complete my front cover which was only 4 hours and I feel proud of this achievement. I used both my audience research and my own research to produce my magazine and I tried to reflect the results of both my results and the audience research results in my work. My ideas for my magazine mostly came from previous experiences with magazines and I feel that by looking back at previous magazines, I have formed my own conventions and I have led my magazine in a way in which I want it to go. The anchorage and the layout of my magazine came from typical conventions of other magazines as I tried to keep it as simple looking as I could. My audience feedback was quite good and I was pleased with what they had to say about my work. Although I did get some negative feedback about my contents page's layout, I tried to change it.
I had to change my double page spread in order to suit both genders as when I asked my audience about my first double page spread, they said that it looked as if it only appealed to females and little children so with that in mind, I changed my double page spread to suit both male and females and also to make it less child-like.
By having red-eye in my photos, I thought I wouldn't be able to get rid of it but with a little bit of Photoshop hunting, I found a tool which was perfect for removing red eyes.
Also, I found that when I was getting rid of my models blemishes, his skin would dent and it looked disgusting so this was a problem that I had to try sorting out. I over came this by stepping backwards and found out that the stepping backwards option could help me plenty of other things during my production.
One typical convention I used for my magazine was making the masthead go across the top of my magazine.
I felt that when you go into a shop to buy magazine, the first place you look, is at the top to see what the title of the magazine is, so, by doing this, I gave into the typical magazine structure. I also made the topics in which are going to be discussed in the magazine run down each side which is something you see on an average magazine.
Also, notice that most of my topics are in different fonts and sizes along the side, I also used this convention from other magazines and I thought by doing this would make it more attractive to readers as having all the things on the front page in the same font and colour would be a bit boring and wouldn’t attract many people.
I tried to use as many different fonts and different colours for my front cover, but also to make it look realistic, not over done. I announced the usual things that are announced on front covers such as competitions and free posters on the front cover to make it appeal more to the audience. I tried to develop the free poster aspect part more by giving a little sneak preview of the poster that will be inside on the top left hand corner. I also developed my own competition award with the “Polaroid experience”
By doing this, I gave the reader an insight into the competition and gave them a choice as to whether whey want to buy the magazine and enter the competition and making the competition appeal to them.
Also, by using a medium close up of my model for the front cover, I am also giving into a typical magazine convention.
Q2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I tried to make my music magazine focus on Indie music alone but with doing so, I realized that it may not appeal to everybody’s sense of style, so with this is mind, I tried to add more genres into the magazine also adding pop and R’n’B to the magazine. I wanted my magazine to appeal to everyone’s age range but because my magazine is fairly colourful and has a teenager on the front, I thought that maybe, it may not appeal to people above the age of 21. Also, a mixture of different colours would appeal to teenagers more than to adults as it is proven that people from the age of 1-21 tend to be attracted to colourful things. I wanted to make my model look calm and approachable. Not too angry looking like other rappers so I made him look to the side for this shot and straightened out any facial lines that made him look angry or stressed using the spot-healing tool to take away any unwanted lines that made him look older than he actually was; photo manipulation.
I dressed my model in a way in which I know teenagers in society now dress. Very colourful and sightly un-coordinated.
I chose what he wore for this shoot because I based his costume around the background scenery as I went to South Bank (The place in which I took the photos) before I took the photos to see whwere exactly I could take it and what style I could take it in. By his hoodie being up, I feel that that reflects the modern 21st century teenager and also depicts normallity within his status, as although he is famous, he still does things that average teenagers do, for example, putting his hood up.
Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
If I was to pick one publishing house to publish my magazine, I would choose
IPC publishing house as they don’t do any other magazines that are similar to mine and I reckon it would be good to distribute this amongst other media magazines in this company. I think that they would publish my magazine as it has nothing to do with magazines that they already distribute and it is a different magazine that will appeal to younger audiences, even younger audiences than NME appeals to. Also, my magazine is an all genre magazine and IPC do not have this. It would be a good addition to the range as I feel that it would stretch further to appeal to all races and ethnicities. I would definitely encourage subscription to my magazine as subscription will increase the popularity and guarantee’s that the magazine is read by at least one person every week. I would want them to be distributed in WHSmiths, corner shops and news agents and by it being sold everywhere would boost popularity and would cause a buzz around the item.
First of all, I would try to distribute my magazine for free to see if it does well then if it does do well then I will put a price to it and sell it for a price between £2.00-4.00.
So distributing it free would mean I would give it to local stores, youth clubs, new agents and colleges and have them to a small survey to see how well it is selling. If it is doing very well then the price may be a little higher than expected and hopefully, even with a price, it might sell well.
Q4.Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for my media magazine primarily would be teenagers although I do think that some adults that like the genres in my magazine may be interesting and may want to purchase it. My target audience initially was all ages but I soon realized (after production of my magazine) that it may only suit the younger generation due to it’s content of modern music and young celebrities. Whilst doing my audience research although most teenagers wanted the magazine, I didn’t want it to be one sided so I tried to base my magazine on everything that I thought would attract the older generations. This didn’t go too well as when I asked some general people after the production of my magazine, they said that my magazine looked as if it was aimed towards 11-19 year olds. Although my magazine may be targeted in the direction of children/teenagers, it would still appeal to adults who like the genre of music that it will include, as music is music and whether the magazine is aimed for adults or not, they will still find some use in the information that may be posted about current music and artists.
Q5. How did you attract/adress your audience?
I used mainly colours and different types of font to attract my audience to my front cover and also I feel that my background image attracted people as my model is standing in an area with a lot of graffiti around him. I also think that my use of various fonts to change the subject and to announce things on my front cover will attract people to my magazine.
I used Standard English on my magazine as if I used slang, it would limit who my magazine would appeal to and I didn’t want that so by using standard English in which everyone can understand, I feel it widened out my opportunity of sales and popularity for my magazine. I used a friendly tone and it was also most as if I wanted the reader to feel as if a woman was reading out the magazine to them by using calm language and calm tone. I also wanted to make it seem as if the reader was interacting with the editor of the magazine and by doing this I feel that it allows the reader to form a relationship with the magazine. It also allows peace of mind when reading the magazine.
I didn’t mention particular places myself, but I mentioned South Bank in the tone of Jaycee, the person in whom I was interviewing. I mentioned it as a caption of one of the Polaroid pictures as I thought by doing this gives the magazine a more realistic appeal. Also, it would have made sense to do so because South Bank is known for its amazing art scenes, one being the place in which we took the photos for the magazine, the skating rink.
I felt that selecting the right kind of font for my magazine was important as if you use a certain type of font, for example using Tines New Roman, can make things seem serious of gloomy. So for my magazine, I tried using less serious looking fonts. I sued fonts in which I feel would look good on a front cover and would reflect how I would want my reader to feel whilst reading the magazine, which is happy and jolly, so with his in mind, I chose fonts in which I know are good to the eye. For example the font that I used for my artist's name:
I also used a variety of bright colours on top of these fonts to give my magazine that, feel good factor.
The hoodie factor of my magazine front cover gives the reader a sense of feeling as if they are part of society as hoodie’s often depict bad behavior but in this case, the main model on the front cover has achieved good things; even with his hoodie up. It gets rid of that stereotype of teenagers and hoodies in society. I also chose an attractive model as I felt that by choosing someone that is good eye candy, would attract people to the front cover. In this case, the model is a boy so this would probably attract females more.
Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In my photography process, I used the flash of my camera and put it on the setting “Night” as it was dark when I took my photos, so by doing that I made the image a little bit brighter. I used the camera from many different angles and directions pointing at my model as I wanted to experiment and didn’t want to stick to the typical conventions of face-on photography.
I learnt a lot about how to use Photoshop for a start and I feel that this task has helped me expand my knowledge of how to use Photoshop. I used plenty of different tools in photoshop and by doing this, I managed to change a lot of things that I didn’t want in my magazine. Like for example, my model had red eyes and I used the red eye tool to remove his red eye so it went from red to brown. I was very happy that I managed to change that.
I didn't need to use that many tools as I planned out what I wanted to do to my maagzine and the background of my magazine was intentionally like that so I didn't need to cut out my main person or use the magic lasoo or anything like that.
Mostly, I used the shapes tool and the text tool for my magazine as I used plenty of different shapes to help form a template for my magazine as seen in my double page spread.
With all this technology at hand, I feel they helped form my magazine quite well. They aided my magazine production.
Q7. Looking back at the preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to a full product?
I feel that I approached both tasks equally and I’ve managed them both well aswell. I managed to gather up my models for both in no time and also managed my time well for both projects. I have managed to finish my evaluation and my research on time for my main task and I feel that with this time management in place, I have given myself some time to check through things in which I am not too confident with. I think that my success came mostly from the amount of time it took me to complete my front cover which was only 4 hours and I feel proud of this achievement. I used both my audience research and my own research to produce my magazine and I tried to reflect the results of both my results and the audience research results in my work. My ideas for my magazine mostly came from previous experiences with magazines and I feel that by looking back at previous magazines, I have formed my own conventions and I have led my magazine in a way in which I want it to go. The anchorage and the layout of my magazine came from typical conventions of other magazines as I tried to keep it as simple looking as I could. My audience feedback was quite good and I was pleased with what they had to say about my work. Although I did get some negative feedback about my contents page's layout, I tried to change it.
I had to change my double page spread in order to suit both genders as when I asked my audience about my first double page spread, they said that it looked as if it only appealed to females and little children so with that in mind, I changed my double page spread to suit both male and females and also to make it less child-like.
By having red-eye in my photos, I thought I wouldn't be able to get rid of it but with a little bit of Photoshop hunting, I found a tool which was perfect for removing red eyes.
Also, I found that when I was getting rid of my models blemishes, his skin would dent and it looked disgusting so this was a problem that I had to try sorting out. I over came this by stepping backwards and found out that the stepping backwards option could help me plenty of other things during my production.
Better Double-page spread
This is the improved copy of my double page spread. I decided to do two copies of my double-page spread as when I looked at my 1st copy over, I realised it looked very feminine and did nto really appeal to both girls and boys. I also realised that the colours were very bright and at some points, the text was not read-able.
So I changed the background colour and the masthead text to look more modern. Although I wanted my magazine to appeal to all ages, I also realised that it looked childish so I made the background dark to seem more serious and not to make it look so child-like.
Friday, 19 March 2010
Double-Page spread.
This was initially my double page spread. I tried to keep to the conventions of my draft but I found it difficult so I made some minor changes to it by changing the title and the layout of the interview.
The colours are vibrant and very child-like which I feel will make the magazine only appeal to certain ages. This is a down factor for me so I will try to improve the magazine double-page spread to make it appeal to most ages.
Also, I noticed that the colours were very girly. I didn't want the magazine to apear bias in any sense so I will try to improve on a colour scheme. The images I used are ofa boy so to make the magazine a girly colour, would not quite make sense.
I also noticed a lot of factors that would make my double page spread not appeal to a lot of people. The fact that the background is yellow makes the page look girlish and calm compared to the front cover and the front cover is mostly the reason why people picked up the magazine in the first place, so by making it calm is not giving the constomer what they wanted.
Contents page
To me, when I was making my contents page, I thought it should resemble the front cover, but then I realised that after looking through other magazines, the contents page looks very different from the front cover. I think my contents page was too messy and did not have any sort of direction what so ever.
So I tried to improve it by making the images look more calm and collective and making the contents page include more than just one photo and also making it have some sort of order.
FRONT
This is my final front cover image. I decided that I should use this one as it looks like a typical front cover image and I think that the graffiti in the background would go well on the front cover. I used plenty of different varieties of text size and font styles which enabled me to make my magazine to look more 21st century-ish and like a real music magazine. 
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