Evaluation of Final Media Product

By Matthew McMinn

Question 1My magazine is a pop music magazine. It challenges the normal conventions of the pop magazines I have analysed in my

research as most (if not all) pop music magazines are aimed at girls aged around 12-15 (we <3 pop and top of the pops). Within these magazines they follow the stereotypes of girls favouring the colour pink above all and using that as their main colour in their colour scheme. However, in my magazine I challenge all these conventions aiming my magazine at a mixed gender, I still imagine this to be niche as I would presume girly girls to still lean towards the bright pink pop magazines. But for the lads and girls that can not stand pink I think this magazine could really work for them and this can be achieved because I have challenged conventions and aimed for a male/female audience. Stereotypically I do not think people expect males to be into pop music. But as a male myself I know that there must be more males out there looking for a pop magazine that they can read without having the colour pink all over it!

Also another thing which I think I have done is made my pop magazine more sophisticated looking. My magazine, compared with the other two on screen, looks very simple and tidy on the front cover. In comparison the other two magazines look very full and messy (in my opinion) and they overload you with information and not everybody wants to be overloaded with information as it can be distracting from what is important. If these covers have a lot of images and text also mixed in with the bright colours then this can really confuse a person at what to look at. What I feel with my magazine is that all the important information is on the front cover and easy to see, the most important being the brightest and biggest text of all the other cover lines. I also feel that the image of my cover star is not lost within all this information compared with Olly Murs on the front of “We <3 Pop” The simplistic look, I think, is the way forward and sometimes less is more and that is what I think I have achieved with my cover.

Something else which I do not feel I have kept to as a magazine convention (and I maybe should have) is continuity! My front cover has a blue to whiter gradient and the contrast and brightness has been altered, yet on my contents page I have a small block of yellow with the word contents in it and then a massive block of blue of which I have not change the brightness and contrast of at all. This makes my magazine pages look like they belong in completely different magazines and I think this could confuse the reader. If we look at “We <3 Pop” then it shows a clear continuity from page to page whereas mine changes very rapidly. Even my double page spread looks slightly dark and sinister with a white to black gradient. On the other hand some readers may find this as a very unique style and link that it is not exactly the same all the way through.

Question 2

The magazines images throughout seem fun but not silly that upper class people would not want the magazine and not that middle-lower class would find it boring. I think this has been done due to the smiles given in the images just reduces a vibe of seriousness in the magazine but does not takeaway from the simple, classy effect. Although I think the colours I have chosen in some places, i.e. the contents page and front cover would prevent some potential A buyers from purchasing the magazine if they saw it in the shops above others. I think the simplicity look has continued through the magazine and this can be an attractive quality as magazines with contents everywhere, jumbled can make people feel the magazine is more aimed at children and that is not what I was aiming for so keeping it simple feels like the right decision.

Within the magazine the images used are of quite a young male figure. This suggests that in the pop music industry a lot of the artists are young and fresh, not a lot of new people that come onto the scene are middle aged people. The only reason for old aged people coming onto the music scene is because they have been in the scene all their life. Another reason for older people not necessarily joining the pop music industry is because they will like the type of music they grew up with, yet the pop music is forever evolving and changing and so older people would not want to make that type of music. The type of music they would want to do there would not necessarily be the audience for this. So I think that the images in this magazine represents this. Also you do not find a lot of ugly looking artists as they would probably not sell music and that is the harsh reality of the industry and world that we live in.

Finally the language I have used has been to get the double page spread article to be like a question and answer conversation to add a relaxation feel to the reading of the magazine and not high intensity. This is because people of A-C1’s can have very stressful lives and so we want them to feel relaxed with our magazine. The way in which I have written the double page spread article represents the interviewer as quite a high class person as it shows they speak the proper queens English compared to the slang that other lower class people may use. The artist being interviewed also speaks in this way which also suggests they come from an upper class family and so the artist is representing people of that status in society, however the image with the text gives the effect that just because they are upper class doesn’t mean they cannot dress in what they like.

The magazine that I have created I think represents the higher end of social groups from A-C1’s as it has a reasonably sophisticated colour scheme and the language is rather formal and so I think that the higher end sophisticated people in society would read this and find it literally correct. Language such as “Crème de la Pop” can come across as high end language. This is because the word “Crème” make you think of France as it is a French word. Many people think of Paris when they think of France and Paris can be portrayed as a high end sophisticated place. This means that straight from first sight of the magazine you get an inference that it is a high end magazine meant for sophisticated people. Also the font of that text is simple and not too complex that it cannot be read and I think this grabs the attention of higher end buyers.

Question 3For the publisher of my magazine I would have Immediate Media Company LTD as they have experience with

publishing not just music magazines but other magazines too, such as shown in the mini table below. All they focus on publishing are magazines this means that I think they will know how to handle publishing my music magazine due to the many years of experience with publishing magazines. Also, when looking at the range of music magazines that they have published, and probably still publish, I feel they have a gap in the line up of many magazines for my magazine to slot into. I feel that the way in which I have uniquely designed the magazine it has a potential to do well to compete with the best.

On the other hand, Immediate Media Company LTD already publish a pop music magazine and this could take them away from the idea of wanting to publish my magazine. However, the two magazines may both be pop music, but, I think that my magazine reaches an audience that the “top of the pops” magazine (the other pop magazine they publish) does not. Therefore my magazine would not threaten the sales of that magazine. This is something that had to be thought about during the planning and design process of my magazine because, a publisher does not want to publish rival magazines because it could affect their sales, especially if it is a new magazine it would be useless for them to publish as they already have one of the market leaders. This means that a new magazine designed to rival a market leader would not stand a chance and so would cause a loss in Immediate Media Company LTD’s profits. From the statistics below I think that this publishing company could get my magazine well known and well heard.

Question 4

My audience for the magazine I have created as shown in my survey results were female 16-25/25+. 25 is still quite a young age and young enough to be into the new, fresh music we have being released. On the market at the minute there are a lot of pop magazines out there for young children and not really a lot for older young people. This maybe due to the developments in technology which has meant that they can find out what they want to know online for free. Yet this can mean searching for stories for hours and reading ones you do find that aren’t even true. So, I would make sure that all stories are true in my magazine to increase the reputation of the magazine which I would hope to increase the sales of the magazine in the long term.

The graph here shows that more females have answered the survey than male people, this is not necessarily to say male people would not buy my magazine, it just means more women took their time out of their lives to fill the survey in. This may not necessarily hugely influence the design of my magazine but it should have some effect.

Question 5I attracted and addressed my audience by keeping a simple yet

sophisticated look to the magazine. My audience is a quite mature ranged audience but my audience also has the ability to see the fun side in things. The colour scheme is not too bright and full of strange colour which would put off the audience. The colours used are fairly simply with gradients implemented so that it does not seem too bland. This way my magazine has factors about it on the front cover and other pages which would make the audience want to purchase the magazine. However, as shown in my audience research they did ask for naturally set pictures and unfortunately due to complications I was unable to deliver this to them. On the other hand I have been able to give my audience the price they have asked for in relation to the surveys which took place about 2 months ago. There were two prices which were even in relation to how many people chose the price so I had to come up with a price to compromise this and hopefully get the audience to buy the magazine.

These results are split evenly between £1.00-£2.00 and £2.01-£3.00 so my price will fit in-between these two price ranges for my audience. So probably around £2.50 because if the quality of the magazine is good, the people not wanting to pay that might try it out could end up thinking the price is worth it. Also because a lot of employed people answered my survey I think the maximum price some people might pay is higher than students may have put.

Of course to get people to buy your magazine you must give them as much as they have asked for as possible. For example, for the feature for my double page spread I was unsure weather to do it about a group or solo artist. I asked the audience in the survey and they preferred a solo artist and that is what I have presented to them, an article about a solo artist Macauley Fwizz. Another thing a I have to done to suit the wants of the audience is ask them how they would like the double page spread to be presented i.e. in the form of an interview or paragraphs. The results showed a preference to an interview style of writing and this may have been because this way the information is broken down and easy for the audience to find and read.

Finally, I asked the audience about the contents page and weather they would like it split up categorically or numerically as I had seen some magazines which I had annotated to have there pages sorted into categories and not have them in numerical order like a traditional contents page. I have presented them this with the way I have set out the page and pages are separated numerically.

Question 6What I have learnt from technologies is that you cannot trust everything you see in the media as it

is too easy for images to be edited. All this shows with the editing of images is that people are not perfect and editors and companies want people to be edited in pictures so that people see themselves as imperfect even though the person in the image is probably as imperfect as the person looking at the image. This false perception is presented to us so that people continue to buy products and compare themselves to celebrities and models. This is a cruel marketing strategy used by almost every company out there to trick people in to thinking they need something or they should do something about something they don’t need to do.

I have learnt is this topic how to edit these images on photos-hop and it is so easy to get rid of peoples “flaws” with the click of a button that they do not even look the same person afterwards. There are many tools which I have learnt to use as I have never used photo-shop before, however I have used fireworks but they are not quite the same programme. Tools I have learnt to use such as the gradient tool and the curse tool took a little longer to get used to what I was doing. Other tools such as the eraser were easy to work out. I did however struggle to place background colour onto the page simply, instead I had to use the paint brush tool to paint the whole page just to get a background and I am still unclear on how to make a background today.

That said I feel that photo-shop is a very amateur friendly programme that has a lot of potential to make even bigger and better products if you know exactly what your doing and what everything does.

Question 7Finally, looking back at my preliminary task of the magazine I did about college I do not think I have learnt anything really

new on the programme. I feel that I may have stayed in my comfort zone and felt afraid to experiment with the different tools which were available for me to use on the programme. I think the way I have gone about designing both of the front covers I have improved in that part but then I think I have had more assitance on the music magazine than on the college magazine. When improvements were added to the music magazine I had similar dashes to the ones which appear on the college magazine. I was advised to remove the dashes. When I did so the magazine looked one-hundred times better and more appealing. One of the other few differences I can see is that I feel my cjhoice in a colour scheme has improved. This maybe due to the change in situation of what the magazine is about but then again it may not be.

However you can see certain similarities in the magazine covers. For example the positioning of the titles is practically in the same place yet they are different sizes. I think the college magazine header looks a lot better in terms of size to the music magazine cover header and that is an area I should maybe improve on next time. The choice of barcode and price placement are also the same but these are minor similarities that do not affect the magazine as much with placement as long as they are in a corner.

One thing I feel I have learnt is that sometimes less is more in production, such as the dashes show that my magazine on the right looks better and more sophisticated due to not having the dashes than the one on the left which has dashes and looks a lot more amateurish.