Prelim Evaluation

Now that I have finished my media product, I can now break down the different stages I took whilst developing my magazine and show the different routes I took to challenge existing ones.

Firstly, I began by looking at existing magazine front covers so that I could see what codes and conventions mine needed to be just as successful and effective.
Here is one example I looked at:

Once analyzing the layout of this magazine and many others I began to develop a similar layout scheme. I choose this particular example to show you because it almost follows the same layout scheme as my magazine. For instance, the mast head is located at the top to give it the most visual impact of the page. So by doing the same with mine, I feel that my magazine will have the same impact. However, to improve competition I needed to challenge other existing magazines by giving off strong connotations through the colour of my mast head as well. I did this by making the colour of my mast head purple to connotate royalty, showing evidence that I've developloped the idea of colour connotation I mentioned in my front cover rationale earlier. Also, I aligned my sell lines on the left of the page because, in theory, it’s been known in western cultures that people read left to right. Therefore, my audience should be reading the sell lines straight after they are enticed by my mast head. Furthermore, using yellow for my sell lines connotates vitality, and the black emphasizes them and my mast head, meaning that I am challenging existing magazines. This is because I want my magazine to appear the most dominant over others and look the most appealing, meaning that existing magazines will feel challenged and therefore forced to do the same. 

Similar features were used in my contents page as well. For example, my contents page uses the same positioning as my front covers mast head does. This is because I want to keep an occurring vibe throughout my magazine, and develop an idea that familiarisation is being used to make my audience feel comfortable with my media product.

After this, I proceeded with adding my image to the front cover. Firstly, I had to take into consideration the text to image ratio. This was so my mast head and sell lines didn't take to much focus away from my image, or vice versa.
Here is an example of an incorrect text to image ratio:

Although this example denies the conventions of an existing magazine, I already knew how to avoid this problem in my rationale. This is because I knew I using middle close up (MCU) camera shot, which in my opinion, is an effective image size for a magazine front cover anyway. After positioning my image to the right of the screen I aligned his eyes to eye level so that my audience feel equal to my model and feel respected because of that. This was made possible from using the rule of thirds.

Coming back to this idea of familiarisation, I positioned my image of a college to the right on my contents page as well. From this, my audience can relate the image in my contents page with the model on the front cover. Also, the picture of the college can be associated with a lot of the sell lines my media product offers. The numbered articles on the contents page let the audience know exactly where to find them.

I feel my media product represents particular social groups through the encoding used within the model on my front cover. I have done this by stereotyping a sophisticated college student so that my audience would feel instant recognition with him. However, to meet these set values of a perfect college student I first had to ask college students on www.facebook.com what they thought they should look like.
Here is a good answer I received:

After collating my answers I tried to make my model represent most of them so that different college students of different social groups can still feel recognition with my model. For example, the use of glasses and the school bag suggests my model is well organised and prepared for his studies. Therefore, students of similar features can associate themselves with the model and students that don't may be inspired to work hard and meet the same values of my model as well. However, I realise some college students may not be capable of these values and could feel offended, but hopefully seeing my model on the front page will encourage them to buy my magazine so they can reassure themselves they are capable. 

The image in my contents also represents a social group from the image of the college. It may not show any students themselves, but represents the type of college's they are attending, showing my audience that these social groups attend highly trained colleges for a good education.

The audience of my media product I am trying to entice would obviously have to be college students of both genders aged preferably 16-18. I had to choose both genders of sex because I can't have my magazine being biased. This is because both genders of sex are equals at college and I don't my magazine disrupting that. To be more specific however, I want my target audience to be those type of college students that are interesting in education and what it has to offer to make there future a successful one. They need to have an interest in what subjects they are doing and how they are going to do it. Furthermore, to relate to them in further depths I needed to know what non-academic activities they got up to as well. On www.findyourtribe.co.uk, and using there research, I was able to find out what tribes where most popular in my area. 

Here is what it showed me: 

Acknowledging that “Townies” were most popular I figured that I should aim to target them as my main audience. Therefore, to attract and address them, I collated the feedback I got from present college students on Facebook and the information from "Find Your Tribe" to use the model in my image as a related point of focus. Furthermore, the colour of the mast head and sell lines would attract them because they are appealing to look at and use colours my audience would define as unisex.

In my contents page, I used direct question to address my target audience directly. This is so they feel apart of my magazine and will therefore like it because it is acknowledging them. Also, the language techniques to these questions aren't formal because I didn't want my target audience feeling challenged. The informal language makes the articles look almost conversational like, creating a very effective form of attraction in my opinion.

During the construction of my media product I have learned new ways of attracting an audience through the use of effective connotations and the relationship with the viewer an image can have. For example, I had no idea what the rule of thirds was when I first began, but now I know the purpose of using it. However, none of this would be made possible without the use of software’s such as Photoshop and InDesign.

I had a vague idea how to use Photoshop to a good standard but I had never used it on a MAC PC. However, this wasn't a problem because I soon learned how to use the MAC hot keys quickly for copying, pasting, saving, etc. Furthermore, I learned how to use layers effectively to make the construction of the magazine easier. Throughout this process of construction on Photoshop I learned how to change its format to JPEG, whereas I didn't know how to do that before and in the past this has left me to problems when the images I was using weren't JPEG.

InDesign was challenging to use. However, I did start to understand it quickly as some features were still the same as Photoshop. I personally would have preferred not to use InDesign because when constructing the contents page the MAC PC's suffered errors which caused my work to be corrupted. I found this frustrating because once finishing my contents page I realised I had used the wrong tool for the placement of my images. Although, my images are there, they have bold boxes around them which I only just realised were there after I had exported my contents page as a JPEG. This is why it is frustrating because when I went back to change it the file I was working with had been corrupted, meaning that I had to use the JPEG image I already had.

Finally, I found this as a trial and improvement process. I have gained new skills I can use throughout the course so I can develop them further, and I've learned what not to do in the future. Hopefully, this will bring an effective final media product.