evaluation of my project

Evaluation

1.
For my magazine I have used conventions of magazines by creating a masthead and placing this at the top right of my magazine. I have also used a main cover image and one smaller image. The main image is slightly different to conventions as it is a close up shot of the lead singer of the band I interviewed and is at a slight angle. Usually magazines have a medium shot, however I choose a ¾ image as was recommended in what makes a good cover image. The smaller image is to give a clue about my double page spread. The text layout is very normal for a magazine around the main cover image giving people ideas about the magazine. I used bright colours to attract people to my magazine, and also for the connotations of use and the target audience of my magazines, as magazines like this also use very bright colours.

2.
My product represents a young audience, and the main image is that of possibly an icon of the indie world smoking a cigarette, this mediates that the person is a ‘rebel’ and doesn’t listen to authority, very much like what young indie rock fans may think they are like. This has been encoded by the angle of the picture, to show he isn’t like everybody else and with the cigarette.

3.
It would probably be a large conglomerate company, as the magazine is a very main stream magazine as has a possible audience in the millions, With that possible target audience and large circulation it would have to be a large company to be able to produce the magazine on such a large scale. They would also have to be able to afford or have the ability to advertise the magazine to the general public on the TV and on the internet, they would have to target certain channels and websites, that my target reader would look at, such as myspace or MTV 2.

4.
My target audience is 16-25 year old indie rock music fans. This is because the main audience of indie rock music is of this age and to target anybody else who likes this music but is of a significant age difference would push my magazine into a niche market, as the stories inside the magazine would be related to different things than the stories inside my magazine.

5.
I have targeted my audience with things such as the bright colours of my magazine and the choice of person as the main cover image. The wording on the front of the magazine is also very informal as it expects the reader to have heard of certain bands, this will help people know if they like that magazine or not very quickly if they just glance at it. We don’t put ourselves above the general public, but we will make the people in the bands look better than normal people this is the mode of address.



6.I have learnt many new skills whilst creating this project, such as how to create, edit and upload articles onto a blog. I already had the skills on photoshop on which to make the front page of my magazine, I just needed to learn how to export them as different types of files to be able to upload them onto the blog. In using Quark, I have learnt many new things as I had never used this programme before, so everything there from changing the colour of the background to adding text and picture boxes and putting pictures and text in, exporting the files as PDF so they could be opened on photoshop and uploaded onto the blog, these are all new skills I have acquired whilst working on this project. I have also learnt the best settings and situations in which to take photos. For example getting the lighting correct and not getting too close up for the image.