My product: Upfront

Evaluation

For my evaluation I used the Internet software prezi. this helped my audience to visualise my product and how I have used conventions and social group pointers to target my magazine at a specific audience.

Evaluation of Upfront, My music magazine. on Prezi

I stuck to typical magazine conventions in terms of the use of buttons, banners, masthead placement, selling line, editors note, columns and stand first. I challenged conventions with my colour scheme as I used four colours instead of three, this was due to looking at a colour wheel and my artist images and noticing that the colour blue works well with red. I used these two colours along with the shades black and white to create a dramatic stand out effect on all three of my products. Another way that I challenged conventions was with the size of my editors note. I made this feature of my contents page quiet large as I used this text to promote what was inside the magazine. Along with reducing the amount of images on my contents page to draw focus of this text.


My target audience was 16-25 year old females who are generally into the lifestyle of a indie/ rock listener. through colour scheme, language, images and fonts. I used market research to find out what my audience wanted under the categories of each of these points. I also found out what bands they generally listen too and incorporated this on my front cover mainly due to sticking with the convention of Kerrang! by adding a band banner to the bottom of the page.

I chose Bauer media as the media institution who would most likely distribute my magazine because they distribute Kerrang!. This means that the company knows the best ways to distribute a rock magazine and this also means that my product would be distributed along with Kerrang! making sure that the audience of Kerrang! is noticing and seeing my product. Bauer media had a turnover of 2.08 billion euros in 2008 and distributes around 300 magazines in 15 different countries. The company is obviously successful and can offer my product to a extremely large audience.

In the duration of this project I have learnt and developed skills in using technologies which has furthered my understanding in how magazine production works. I have learnt new skills such as using prezi and using SLR cameras to take aesthetically pleasing photographs. I have developed my skills in using photo shop as I was able to perform simple tasks on the software before but now I am capable of many different actions. Another piece of software that I have learnt to use is Blogger, this online blog has helped me to keep track of my progress and helped me to understand what the uses of a blog are.

In terms of comparing my music magazine to my preliminary task I think that I have improved a lot in terms of understanding layouts and use of colour within a magazine. I also think that my understanding of conventions as well as social groups has developed a lot within this project.

Once I had finished my product I created another small survey for my target audience to judge the magazine. 95% of my target audience that took part in the survey thought that my colour scheme used was effective. This was good as I took the feedback on colour schemes form my survey before creating my product. 85% of my target audience said that they would pay £2 for my magazine weekly. I chose £2 as that price as it is slightly cheaper than Kerrang!. 55% of my target audience said that the colours of my magazine is what attracts them most to the product, followed by 25% were attracted by the layout of the magazine.

TIME FOR IMPROVEMENT

After putting together my pages for my magazine. I have looked over them and found areas which could do with improvement, For example, My Front Cover has got letters on it which are in lower case. I have now changed them so that they are all in upper case to meet conventions of magazines. On my contents page I have only used two images, the contents pages of other magazines have several images on them so I have decided to add another image. Finally my Double Page Spread was looking too lost, in the sense that you could not distinguish the difference between paragraphs and you could not read the stand first due to the blue on black background as well as lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Here are my magazine pages with the changes that I have made.

<--------CAPITALS

<----A NEW IMAGE

• OUTER GLOW ADDED TO STAND FIRST
• THE BEGINNING OF EACH PARAGRAPH IS MARKED WITH A DIFFERENT COLOUR LETTER AND AN INDENT.
• I HAVE CORRECTED SPELLING AND GRAMMAR MISTAKES.

My double page spread

Here is my double page spread after changing and checking punctuation:

Making of double page spread

Here is a powerpoint which shows the step by step making of my double page spread:

Making of dps

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my contents page

Here is my contents page for my magazine:

Making of contents page

Here is a powerpoint showing my step by step process of outting together my contents page:

Making of contents page

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