Media Magazine Evaluation by Samah Ibtes

As for our AS Media course, we were assigned to do a music magazine front cover in which we had to get into groups of 3 or 4. We were allowed to pick any genre and an age group the magazine should appeal for.
The people in my group were Brooke, Andy and Faruke. After careful consideration, we decided that our genre was going to be pop as the genre of pop has changed dramatically over the years with different artists and bands coming and going. The name of our music magazine is “PopWave”- as this title gets straight to the point of what kind of music we have inside our magazine. We also decided that our target audience was going to be 9-16 year olds as pop is usually associated with this age group and is very popular among teenagers.
My group decided that we were going to have a monthly issue of each magazine in which the order is:
Andy: October issue
Faruke: November issue
Brooke: December issue
Me (Samah): January issue

My initial idea of the music magazine front cover was to have one person standing in front of the camera surrounded by balloons and party poppers looking directly at the camera, smiling as this connotates celebration as new years was going be my chosen theme.
The reason this wasn’t possible was because I realized that having a traditional theme of new years was pretty much predictable on a January issue of any kind of magazine. In order to attract audience more, we need to engage them by doing something different but still relating to them.

For one day my group were given a camera and we went around the whole school, also bringing along props such as balloons and party poppers for taking our magazine. We took a series of different kinds of shots all over the college and we had to think deeply about how we were going to operate and change the picture into making it look like an actual music magazine.

Before starting our front cover, the whole class were a given a tutorial into how to use Adobe Photoshop. An application in which is used to edit, fix and/or create pictures. This was a one-day lesson where we were shown how to add/edit texts on images, cropping and pasting on images, changing brightness and contrast etc.

When actually starting to do our cover, the reason I picked the image was because the people in my image are around the same age group as the target audience. They are all wearing dark colours in contrast to the bright background this was so because they would stand out more instead of blending in with the background this is to symbolise a message to the audience telling them: “Stand out more in life and to get more noticed, that’s what the people in the magazine did and look where they are now!”
The genre of pop is different compared to other types of music. Pop doesn’t tell anyone to dress a certain way whereas rock tells the audience that wearing black is cool and hip hop tells the audience that talking and acting a certain way will take you places. Pop allows people to think for themselves without having to look like anyone or dressing like them. This is shown in my front cover by having a four people sitting on steps of stairs as my main cover image, in their own way and attitude dressing completely different to one another.

The ways in which I challenged the conventions of a real music magazine was the theme of my cover. I did previous research on typical music January issue magazines and most of them had many different kinds of messages to wish the audience a ‘Happy Year’. I did this differently, by having my main cover line talk about the people in my main cover image which was the band ‘Candi’ starting a new year back at school. This could relate to the audience as they are students who could dislike education but could give out a message that even their favourite group have to deal with the fact of going to school.

The media institutions that may distribute my magazine are billboards and newspaper articles. This is because they are easy to get to around and the public are more likely to see the magazine being advertised rather if on TV Ads they have a chance of seeing but none is certain because people usually change the channels when the adverts are up.

I attracted my audience by using bold fonts ad colours. The magazine was aimed at both sexes so I used colours that boys and girls can both relate to.

If I did the magazine again, I would change the colour of the main cover line because it blended in with the colour of the costumes the people were wearing. I would have included more exciting stories in the magazine about music artists and celebrities.

In doing this magazine, I have learnt many things about music and the reasons for why the music industry is so popular. I have learnt that people use music for their entertainment or their own way of spending their free time.

I really enjoyed this task!!!!

Media Magazine Evaluation:

At the beginning of this project we were all put in to groups of four within our media class and had to agree on a genre for the magazine, with much deliberation we decided as a group to go with a pop genre as it would be fun to make and easy to follow the conventions of pop, we then decided to call it Pop wave as we feel this title is catchy and sounds good to say. As there were four of us in the group we all decided to take a month of the magazine and create the cover for it as it was a monthly selling magazine:
Andy = October issue – Halloween
Faruk = November – Bonfire night
Brooke (Me) = December - Christmas
Samah = January - New years
After planning of the covers of our magazines we were given a camera to go around the college and take creative shots for our magazine cover, we were allowed to bring in props and outfits to make the magazine cover look more professional. After taking the photos we had to think carefully about how we was going to manipulate the images to fit with our front cover.
When creating my magazine pop wave I tried to stick to the typical conventions of an already existing magazine on the market nowadays. I haven’t really challenged any conventions of a magazine because I strictly followed the so – called rules to creating a pop magazine so that I could still appeal to my target audience (9-16) and also make it look like an already existing magazine rather than a make shift magazine that doesn’t look legitimate or real.
I used a girl dressed in pink who is smiley and looks cheesy pop as my main image on the cover of the magazine as she would appeal to my target audience as they would like to see a pop star that I have created on the front of the magazine and would be interested in her and also it fits in with the pop genre.
For the background of the magazine I used a snowy tree background as I was covering the December issue of the magazine and thought that it linked well with the issue. The layout of my magazine is typical to a normal magazine layout as I kept the conventions the same but added my own touch to personalise it.
The colours on my magazine are limited to Pink, Green and white as again it fitted with the Christmas/pop theme and I also think that limiting the colours makes it look more edgy and professional, rather than having a million colours on it making it look messy.
With the font I have kept it green to contrast with the background and also to fit in with the Christmas feel. I have made the font kind of bubbly, chunky and round as it would draw the eye of my intended target audience and also portrayed pop very well. The language on the front of my magazine is quite simple, standard English as my target audience are of a young age and wouldn’t understand complex vocabulary. Also I tried to make it an informal conversational tone of talking as I would like to think that the buyers of my magazine want to be on a level with the publisher and feel like they are chatting with us.
I have added a promotional offer on the front of my magazine, it is giving away a key ring, which draws attention from the target audience and encourages them to purchase the magazine as they get the key ring along with the magazine.
My music magazine appeals to a certain social group because I have chosen it to and also by choosing pop it appeals to a certain group anyway. I would say that a white girl around the age of 10 is the most likely person to buy this as this is my intended target audience and also I have added headlines on my magazine that would definitely appeal to my audience for example, Zac Efron who is a teenage heartthrob and many girls and boys would like to read about him as he is good looking, famous and appeals to a wide target audience.
I think that IPC should distribute my magazine as they are the UK’s leading consumer magazine publisher with already 90 brands of magazine and they sell over 350 million per year so I think that it would be a good idea so go with this media institution as they would publish my magazine well and hopefully sell a lot along with their other successful magazines.
The audience for my magazine is females 9 -16 as these are the people that I think would be interested in pop and would be interested in reading what I have put into my magazine.
Over the course of this project I have learned a lot about technologies from the process of constructing this magazine front cover. I have learnt about already existing magazines and how they choose to represent and target their audience. Photoshop techniques is the area which I learnt a lot like manipulating images, cropping, adding colour, images, adding text, arranging layers, putting effects on texts and much much more when creating this magazine. We have used apple Macs to create this magazine cover which I have found easy as I own an apple Mac so I am used to the way they function and the processes used on them.
If I were to create this magazine cover again I would do a few things differently. I would have put more thought and effort into the photographing for this magazine to make it look more pop and professional so that it wouldn’t look out of place on the market with already existing magazines. I would change the colour of some for the headlines on my front cover so that they are more physically appealing to the eye and make them stand out. If started again I would put more planning in to the whole project so that I was more organised and so I would make it easier for myself and also for a little extra help I would research more existing magazines so that I had more of an idea of what I wanted mine to look like.

Magazine Evaluation

Firstly we were put into groups of four within our class and then we had to decide on the name of our magazine and what the front of our magazines would look like. We all agreed on a pop genre magazine and that the magazine name would be ‘PopWave’. That we all would do four different issues of our magazines which would be months, I was doing October, Brooke was doing December, Faruk doing November and Samiah doing January and we had our main colours, mine was Green, Brooke’s was Pink, Samiah’s was blue and Faruk’s was Black. We decided that our target audience would be children ages from 9 to 16 because we felt that it would be easier to design a magazine for children rather than adults and that the younger generation would be more into pop music rather than the older generation. ’PopWave’ is also only £1.50 which also would appeal to our audiences as it is cheap and not a lot of money as you are getting quality for your money.

Once we finished planning what our magazines would have, a camera was given to share between the group and we had to go around the college taking many pictures for our magazine using our own props if we wanted to e.g. balloons. Once we was done taking all our pictures we then had to pick which picture we wanted to use for our magazine cover and then we used Adobe Photoshop to edit the pictures however we liked such as making the picture darker/ lighter, adding texts, cropping the picture.

My magazine (October) is a unisex issue rather than targeted on one gender like Brooke’s magazine. In my magazine I am giving away a free Frankenstein teddy bear as my magazine’s theme is something around Halloween, by this I edited the picture so that it looks darker and my magazine name is dark green. I think that my magazine would stand out to the other magazines because of my amazing headlines such as ‘interview with Click from Candi’ which is a two man band that include me and Faruk. I also put things like ‘Win your own Nintendo Wii’ which can also attract the readers as they have the chance of winning a games console, this is too good to be true as a Nintendo Wii games console would cost around £200 but you have the chance of winning one when you pay only £1.50 but in the real world its pretty much like the lottery because you have such a little chance of winning. I have decided to advertise my magazine by using only billboards and posters on buses because it will cost too much money to advertise on television.

In the past few weeks I have learned about technology from the process of constructing my magazine cover which includes taking the background picture – you have to leave some space at the top so when you edit it you can put the name of your magazine in and everything in your picture needs to look good because you cant have one person smiling and another person making silly faces unless that is what you want to have on your magazine, also I have learned how to use Adobe Photoshop to edit and manipulate photo/ pictures such as brightening, making it darker, changing the colour, cropping. I also realised that you need to spread your words out because if you put everything all in one corner it will look too cramped and will make your magazine look unprofessional which causes people not to buy your magazine, I tried to use different fonts and styles for each strap line because this would make my magazine cover look less boring and eye catching.

If I was going to make another front cover of a music magazine I think I would change almost everything about my magazine because although I like my magazine now I feel that it is a bit too simple and if I was going to design another magazine cover I might change it to a R’n’B genre music magazine, I would dress more appropriately for the ‘photo shoot’ because in my magazine the clothes I and Faruk are wearing is not similar to clothes that a pop star would wear. I also would put a bit more humour into my magazine because personally I would rather buy a magazine if it was more funny and I would put in some slang too because if our target audience was teenagers, they would feel more involved and relate to more if there was some slang in the magazine which would also make it a bit more funnier e.g. ‘Find out the top ten hottest chat up lines init’ Overall I would spend more time planning on my whole magazine, or I could have used my computer at home to experiment with Adobe Photoshop to try out different styles to suit what I had in mind e.g. I could have made my magazine more spookier because my theme is Halloween.

Date: Wednesday 8th October

EVALUATION

The Music Magazine cover that I have created challenge forms and conventions of a real Music Magazines cover this is because my Magazine cover has all the terminologies that you will find on a real Magazine. E.g. masthead, banner, main cover image, main cover line, bar code, price, issue date, boxed text and a strap-line.
My Magazines masthead is called ‘popwave’ we had a group discussion and we decided to call are Magazine ‘popwave’ this is because are magazine genre is about pop music. We came up with two Magazine names, one of them was called ‘popcorn’ and the other one was called ‘popwave’ however we decided to use ‘popwave’ for are Magazine cover this is because ‘popcorn’ is more like a cinema Magazine rather than an pop or a music magazine.
I have also included a banner on my Magazine cover this is to make my audience more interested so that they buy the Magazine. My banner is ‘the UK’s No 1 POP Magazine’ this gives an appearance that the Magazine is the UK’s best Magazine which will make the audience want to read it.
I also included the strap-line (http://www.popwave.co.uk/) so that the readers could always get online and find the latest information as the magazine is only a monthly issue. I also included a free latest pop CD and two competitions one of them is to win an iPod and the other one is to win a call from Faruk Tinz, so that more readers would be persuaded to obtain the magazine. I priced the magazine at £1.50 because I believe this is the suitable price for a young teenager to afford. My magazine cover also has its own logo of a music letter next to the heading so that readers will automatically know what magazine it is as this would be our signature logo of ‘popwave’. This makes it as a convention of a real magazine cover.
My music magazine cover can correspond to certain social groups due to colours and the fonts. This can represent teenagers and the reader can therefore relate to them, I included male artists so that it relates to the male genre group of the magazine. As it is targeted to unisex, I thought it would be a good to have interviews with male artist, as this would attract the female audience and for the male audience I have included some main cover lines like ‘what girls really want’ and ’20 hottest stars under 20’ to attract male audience therefore they would want to read the magazine.
The types of media institution that I would like my music magazine cover to be published will be the independent publisher and E-map this is because they will help use with ideas and headlines therefore this will make my magazine sell more.
My magazines audience would be aimed at male and female teenager age 10-16 years old who are interested in pop music I will attract the audience through interviews and latest news from artists. E.g. win a call from Faruk Tinz furthermore I will be attracting my audience throughout the bold colours and the different size and types of font. The language used in my magazine is formal English, therefore that it doesn’t just appeals to my target audience but it could appeal to everyone who is interested in pop music. The star that I have used on the cover will attract the female audience and the cover lines will attract the male audience.
From this process the technologies I have learned is the process of constructing of magazine front cover. I learnt how to use Apple Macs this is because I have never used it before including Photoshop and I learned tricks to emphasize the picture and how different layouts can make the magazine cover better. I have learned how to manipulate an image to make it look completely different to how it was originally taken. I used digital cameras to take pictures of the people on my front cover.
If I were to make another magazine front cover I would have selected a lighter background this is because the background I have is dark and it does not make the magazine stand out. Whereas if I was to use a lighter background it would of made the magazine more original and more outstanding. I would of wearied a better costume on my cover this is because the cloths I was wearing was not pop and did not look like pop star cloths. If I had the change to do another magazine cover I would of wearied cloths that are more pop star type. I would have put more thought and effort into the photographing for this magazine to make it look more pop and professional so that it wouldn’t look out of place on the market with already existing magazines.

Introduction for Photoshop and Starting of magazine

In this lesson we were taught the basic workings of photoshop. we learned skills such as adding text, merging images, cropping, backgrounds,manipulating images, changing gradients and contrasts, fonts and the magic wand tool etc. 

After listening and learning the basic skills of photoshop i then transported my image in to an A4 photoshop document and started working on my magazine cover. I first chose a picture to use for my cover and added a christmas theme background as i am creating the December issue. i then added headlines and manipulated the text to suit it to the style of a pop magazine. i obviously added a barcode, price, date, website etc to the magazine as these are the conventions of a normal magazine. lastly i added a promotional offer which says free key ring for every reader which would attract buyers and encourage them to buy the magazine. 

Lesson on taking photos

In this lesson, we reviewed the front images of magazine covers and said what pictures/images would be suitable for our front cover and how to adapt the image to suit the style of the magazine. we was also told to take pictures with blank backgrounds so that they could be easily manipulated in photoshop. 

After this quick talk each group got a camera and we went about the college taking suitable images for our covers. like fashion photographers we took lots of photos which gave us the room to pick and choose photos from a variety of shots. 

We then had a look through as a group and decided which image we were each going to use and then gave the cameras back to get our images downloaded onto the Apple Mac's.

Date: Friday 3rd October

In this lesson we were taught how to use the basic form of Photoshop, We learnt the skills such as text, cropping, overlapping pictures, using the paint fill box to experiment with different colour backgrounds. Also transposing, changing the gradient, photo manipulation, sizes of images and fonts and learnt how to use the magic wand tool. We also learnt how to add shapes to the page and how to insert more than one image to our selected page. Then I started to create my magazine front cover I started by using one of the pictures as my background then I started to type up the title which was ‘pop-wave’ and I also added the barcode, date, issue, slogan and the free pop CD.

Date: Wednesday 1st October

In the lesson we looked at composition of pictures and how our pictures should be taken to make sure that they are suitable to be edited easily when doing our magazine covers and are teacher showed us some technical things that we can do so that the editing of are picture could be easy. After that each group got there camera and went out and took pictures around the college, we took as many as we could so that we had enough of pictures to choose from when deciding what picture we gona use in the magazine front cover.

Music Magazine Practical Day one

Today we discussed the genre, title and sell lines of our magazine. We decided to have a monthly issue of our magazine and for it to be mostly aimed at a 9-16 year old audience.
My group have decided to call our magazine "PopWave" and our genre for the music of our magazine to be pop. "PopWave" relates not only to the genre of our magazine is but also to the target audience.
Also, "PopWave" would need to appeal to both sexes as we would like to promote equal opportunity. So we have decided to have each issue appeal to a female audience then the next to a male audience.
We have also decided to have each member of our group to solely concentrate on one issue each. I will be focusing on the January issue.
As January is the first month of the year, the public would be expecting a 'New Years theme' so the ideas I have so far for the issue is to have a traditional theme with many balloons surrounding the image and a "Countdown" clock in which the minute and hour hand are facing north. This is convey the 'New Year' in which many people get excited about every year.

I would like the model on the cover to be facing the front and looking straight at the camera, looking very happy and excited that it's the new year also carrying a party popper as though getting ready for the new year.

The sell lines on my January issue of "PopWave" is going to have:

"Something Vanessa doesn't want Zac to know!" feature with a small image beside the text. The image will be:

This image will mostly attract female audience as my issue are mainly based on this target audience.
Vanessa Hudgens is a very well known actress/singer who is famous for being in Disney's 'High School Musical'. She is also known for dating her co-star, Zac Efron, and the target audience will want to know the 'secret'.

Another of my sell lines is "Miley Cyrus' new years resolutions!"

Miley Cyrus is a very famous singer who is very well known by teenagers as playing the main role of "Hannah Montana" which is the popular TV show by Nickelodeon. The sell line also relates back to my theme as being for New Years Eve season.

Another of my sell lines is going to be a heading saying "Gorgeous Amanda Show's Drake Top 5 ways of Greeting Girls!" This is going to appeal to the audience mainly because this issue is based on female audience and can attract fans who have a crush on Drake.

My final sell line is going to be a free gift when buying "PopWave" which is a glamorous notebook and stylish pen. This will be another reason for teenagers would buy the magazine as it allows them to get cute freebies.

Music Magazine Practical

Day 1. Today we started looking at audiences for magazines and then we looked at music magazines, we then discussed the title, genre and what our magazines are going to have on the cover. We decided that the name of our magazine would be called 'PopWave', our target audience is people aged 9 to 16. 4 of us would have to design a different cover each for different months. I am going to design the October issue of the magazine, i am going to have a halloween theme e.g. the font could be green and have a 'blood-dripping' effect and i would put images of bats in the corner and cobwebs around the picture also. My issue of the magazine is going to give away a free pencil and rubber to the readers, it would also have a interview with Skandar Keynes from narnia which is exclusively only with PopWave.

My issue would also have fun, spooky halloween jokes and Daniel Radcliffe's top ten secrets.

music magazine practical day 1

Today we started to think of ideas about what audiences that we could appeal to when creating a magazine for example: Age, Gender, lifestyle, nationality etc. 

We looked over some cover terminology which included The masthead, banner, cover lines etc which we are going to follow when creating our magazine covers ourselves. Then we looked at an existing magazine cover and analysed it by creating a stereotyped character that would possibly read this magazine.

We are now going to create a magazine front cover ourselves and we had a brief to follow when creating the elements for our cover. In my group there are  4 people and each of us will be focusing and producing different issues for different months, i am producing the December issue as i thought it would be fun to produce and i could associate the cover with Christmas. Our magazine is called 'Pop Wave' and the genre we chose to cover is POP and will be aimed at 9-16 year olds as this is the age group that i think would buy this magazine. Some of the sell lines i am going to be using on the front cover of my magazine to grab the readers attention is...

An interview with teenage heartthrob Zac Effron as young teens like him and will be interested about reading about him.

i am also going to include 'Spice Girls secrets from tour' as they are pop icons from back in the 90's and they have recently had a comeback tour which many people where interested in.

I am going to add in a free key chain as a promotional offer that may draw readers attention because as well as getting the magazine you get a free key chain as well.

Christmas chart toppers is going to be another sell line as because my issue is around Christmas time readers want to know what the up to date music chart is at the time.

I am also going to include the Jonas brothers who star in Camp rock as many teens worldwide recognise them and would like to read more on them.

Lastly on the front cover my model is going to be my sister and i am going to introduce her as a new pop sensation as i feel this is individual and unique. i am going to be taking the picture myself and going to incorporate elements of a Christmas feel to it as i am doing the December issue.

music magazine practical day 1

Today we started to look and think of facts about what audiences at the music magazines could appeal to when creating a magazine have eg nationality, gender, children, age, social grouping, lifestyle, format (fans) and more. Then we started to analysis and looked at some cover terminology which included masthead, banner, graphic, boxed text, main cover line, strapline and more. The music magazine we analysis in our gruop was called the Musics. Which then we had to talk about the cover the terminology in our gruop. We then was set a task to do which was to create are own music magazine and we are going to follow the terminology when creating our own magazine covers. Then we looked at an existing magazine cover and analysed it in the class by creating a stereotyped character that would possibly read that magazine. We are then toled to create a magazine front cover ourselves which we had a brief to follow when creating the elements for our magazine front cover.

Then we got into groups of four and started to create a magazine cover and each of us will be focusing and producing one different issues for each different months, and i am going to create the November's issue. In my group we decided to call are magazine "pop-wave" and it is a Pop magazineaimed at age groups between 09 to 16 years old. Also are magazine is going to be published monthly. I thought that the November issue will be particular interesting this is because it is a month of the colourful firework displays that take place around the UK and it is one of the best entertainment that makes kids interesting particular age groups between 09 to 16 years old. which means that I could associate the cover with fireworks.

I am going to add a free gift like a free CD of pop musics and small gifs that is aimed at 9 to 16 years old kids. in my issue of the magazine i will be interviewing Gabriella montez (Vanessa Anne Hudgensfrom) from the high school musicls