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.