Music Magazine Evaluation
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I used many differing conventions throughout my production, including;
Masthead
Price
Date
Barcode
Teasers
Tag Line
Images
And font and colour scheme
All of which I believe, via the findings in my planning and initial task are essential in the make up of a magazine production. In particular, I felt it vital to chose no more than three to four main colours and rotate them consistently throughout – I deem this gives the finished piece a professional finish.
Similarly, only a few contrasting fonts are used during the production – containing the Bootle font, a font synonymous with The Beatles, and thus giving a not only retro perception but an acknowledgement to a famous band that are integral to the genre of music I am aiming at. Furthermore choosing to name the magazine Revolver UK – with Revolver being the title of a famous Beatles album also has this effect. The UK element to the title sprung from internet research were I unfortunately found my favoured title Revolver was already the title of a production in the United States – the UK element thus representing a differing product. Despite my admiration for many conventions – I disagreed with the desired affect of countless images, particularly on NME’s front pages – I felt there were too many streams of information and thus this distracted from the main image, which I think should attract more than the majority of attention – therefore I challenged the existing conventions.
I established students as the focal social group to target my product towards – therefore by featuring bands such as Oasis and Kasabian – bands which are currently very much in the public eye – I believe I have fulfilled this obligation towards my target audience. This is the same audience which courtesy of my questionnaire I found indie music to be their favouring genre – all of my artist features again fit this bill. Moreover, channel 4 was the majority’s choice with regards to preferred television channel, and thus I implemented this in my double page spread, using intertextuality to name the station’s programme ‘The Big Art Project’.
I would tend to think that a company such as IPC Media or the Baeur Media Group would be the ideal institutions to distribute my product – I have taken many positives from their current products NME Magazine and Q Magazine, thus hope they would consider my production.
I believe I have a detailed and specific target audience – compiled via my research, in no small part to the questionnaire I distributed. I am aiming to apply to the following in particular;
Males
16-18
Fans of the indie music genre.
Despite this I believe my target audience offers flexibility as whilst males are the primary aim, fans of the indie music genre gender wise are varied and thus my production could comfortably cross gender.
During the creation of my magazine I feel I have developed a better understanding of how to use Microsoft Publisher, however do prefer the technical aspects that Photoshop provides – giving a more professional approach – in particular the original images, which I found easier to manipulate.
I don’t feel I could have completed this task to the standard I have without the planning process I undertook, a large amount of time was taken, assessing current magazines aimed at a similar target audience to mine – in particular NME and Q provided great inspiration and numerous ideas. Questionnaire’s provided a perfect insight into the opinions of my target audience and using ‘LIIAR’, exploring the many strands of media such as language, institution, ideology, audience and representation and my knowledge of it now made the task much more realistic.
One aspect I believe I failed on during my task was time-management leading me to be unable to organise actors, props, location and costume.
Unfortunately I mis-calculated the time and effort it would take and thus failed to provide a main original image on my double page spread – I did however provide a smaller image on the page, although the location was not ideal.
I believe in future productions I would address this accordingly, booking all I needed well in advance.
However, I do believe the main contributing factor towards my final piece was undoubtedly partaking in the preliminary task of producing the front page of a college magazine – I am firm believer that practice makes perfect – and mistakes made – such as the large original image being out of focus and in my opinion the incorrect style of shot (I went on to use a close up in my main task) being the main mistakes I have since rectified.
