Feedback - 28/11/09

A promising start Taylor- but you are a little behind the other students - you need to do more work at home on this blog.

The first genre you should be analysing is music magazines - outline the conventions and then look at covers, contents pages and feature articles and think about the following questions...

- Do they follow typical conventions of music magazines? If not why?

- Who is the target audience (GRASS) and how have they been made to appeal to them?

- Do they successfully make the audience want to read on? ( Cover and contents?)

- why do they work?

In research you need a little more on audience - who is your target audience (Demographic - GRASS and psychographic profiling - Young and Rubicon) Also how will your product appeal to its audience - use MAslow too.

questionnaires are needed - to your target audience - and feedback on this - charts and graphs are always good!

Go onto the ABC website to find out audience/circulation figures for magazines too - is there a market out there for your product?

Now move onto planning this week - ( see the last two sheets on the 'before you blog' handout) Start your mood boards, rough mock up of pages, props list, shooting schedule etc....

Preliminary Task - Print

Secondly for my Preliminary Task I had to create a rough draft contents page for my prelim task front cover. My contents page is a simple layout  that is linked into the theme of a college magazine. It is quite basic in colour and appearance which realistically would not appeal to the reader. However, I was able to keep the contents list suitable to the audience as the language is suited towards the young audience by the humorous puns and relevant info that will interest them for example 'Winter Ball 09'. I have very little use of images on my contents page so this means that the text is more dominant and so there is no direct address. I managed to add one image to the contents page which kept in with the running theme of winter. This may create a slight direct address because this would inform the reader that this will be the ongoing theme throughout.               

Preliminary Task - Print

In my Preliminary task I had to create a front cover for a new School/College magazine, which would feature a photograph in medium close-up shot of a student including appropriately laid-out text and a masthead.

What worked well

- It was my intention to make the magazine cover bright as this brings interest and entices the audience towards the magazine. This also added to the theme of the magazine as it brought out a sense of college spirit.

- I co-ordinated the colours into and blue and white colour scheme, this was because I thought it best reflected my target audience as it looked fresh and clear to read. This also represented my genre as it was edging towards the theme of winter and snow and so made the magazine cover crisp and bold.      

- I believe my title helps create a brand image as it will look easily recognizable to the student audience as it looks academic in that it looks hand written in neat italics. I also included a slogan underneath my title which brings back the theme that this is a college magazine that is made just for students. 

- My image of the model photographed was a clear medium shot which included the models upper torso. This gives direct address to the audience as it is clear he is a student and can relate to the audience.        

What went wrong

- I had a very small variety of fonts, the only difference in font was my title and subheadings. This made my magazine less visually interesting and eye-catching as the font was plain and all identical. However I did keep to the 'house style' as I had stuck to the same fonts. 

- My subheadings were quite poor and I don't think they advertised the magazine well as they are not interesting enough to appeal to the student audience. 

- I had also not included a date and barcode onto my front cover which would have helped in the realistic appeal on the college magazine.     

- As I only used InDesign to create my prelim task the image used on the cover  does not look professional as the model has red-eye and unwanted shadows around him, this may be because of the flash on the camera. However when I am creating my final project I will use Photoshop to edit the image.     

 

Chosen Brief

My name is Taylor Barnes and for my main task coursework I will be creating a new music magazine.