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.