Media Evaluation of a music magazine

1. EVALUATION
TOM CARTER
Candidate Number: 3106
Centre Number:54137
Centre Name: Shebbear College

2. 1. In what ways does your media product
use, develop or challenge forms and
conventions of real media products?

3. Noticeable Masthead, stands out
stays with the colour scheme of
the whole magazine.
Cover lines, notice no
main cover line just all
in equal size, not to
take
Competition, which attracts
the readers attention from the
Masthead to the bottom of
the page.
Barcode and price,
also showing what
month and year the
magazine was
published .
Picture used is a dark
style to fit in with the
general theme of the
magazine, Model wearing
black clothes as a
stereotypical metal band
member would wear.
Most interesting cover
lines put in circles and
most attractive put in a
star to signify that it is
very important.

4. Contents stick out to the
reader in an attractive
and different font that
hasn’t yet been seen in
the magazine
Attractive font to
appeal to the certain
audience that will be
reading this specific
magazine.
New/different stories
that wouldn’t have
been in any
previous magazines
to appeal to the
target audience and
possibly even a
different type of
audience.
Same
model and
colour
scheme as
on the front
cover to
show
continuity
and
organisation
Lots of different
content within lots of
different pages with
the most important
being at the back of
the magazine.

5. Attractive and interesting headline to appeal to the particular
audience that the genre is targeting.
Interesting
content with
varied and
different
questions,
although
inspiration was
taken from
Kerrang! when
writing this.
Included a website and a twitter account for our readers that
would be more in touch with technology
A quick summary of
the band and what
they have
accomplished in
their career.
Picture of the
lead singer from
the band (The
interviewee)

6. Whist researching this genre of magazine, I researched magazine such
as Decibel and Kerrang! and both of these magazines I discovered that
this was the type of magazine I was aiming to make mine like.
After analysing many magazine I decided that the house style I liked
best wasn’t anything like Kerrang! or Decibel it was a magazine that was
actually a bit brighter and wasn’t the genre I was looking at to start off
with but Q actually influenced me a lot.
I have decided to use three main colours in the magazine and that is
red,black and yellow, the reason I used these three colours mainly in my
magazine is because black is stereotypically associated with metal
groups, red grabs the attention of the potential reader and yellow,
because it is not very often seen in a metal magazine which is
surprising.
For my Masthead, I went for a very impacting font and a very bright
colour with a dark background to make sure that was the first thing that
the potential readers saw before buying the magazine.
The cover lines used are all quite interesting but quite subtle, with the
use of white on black with yellow as the page numbers, it makes sure
that people will still be able to read them but not taking the attention
away from the main picture of the masthead.
The picture I went for was just a single model as it is quite cliché having
multiple people on the front cover of a metal/rock magazine.

7. 2. What elements are used to
construct the
representations?

8. Text
Masthead is yellow and black,
with a serif font to make the
magazine seem more
confident
How does my media product represent social groups?
The cover lines used
are all at one side of the
page going down which
creates a certain type of
neatness for the front
cover
Model wearing black in style
clothing with a snapback, also
model is showing a gloomy
yet confident expression, but it
is as if he doesn’t care
whether he is on the
magazine front cover or not,
which may appeal to the
majority of teenagers that read
this magazine.
house style colours would appeal to audience
because of the yellow which makes it different to
many other magazines of similar genre and style

9. Carrying on with the house style only the contents and
the name of the magazine are in yellow because that
makes them stand out, there is also a lot of red on this
page to also make it stand out.
Only one model, which is the
same as on the front page,
quite young and has a bit of
fashion sense which would
appeal to the modern day
fashionistas
For the content, i have made it
black with the numbers being in
red so it is easier for the reader
to find what they are looking for.
I also made the page numbers
try to fit in with the house style
because even if they are the
most important thing on the
page they still may not be what
the reader is interested in.

10. Model portrayed in
black and white to
appeal to the more
mature audiences,
also given a different
person to match his
band name,
Audiences may
believe he is mature
because he is the
spokesperson for the
whole band as
mentioned underneath
the picture.
Masthead is different and big, this would appeal to my typical audience because
ideally they would ruin anything for money, due to the fact they may be working
for a low income and would dream of having millions and millions.
Content of
magazine is
different and
interesting,
not usually
what is read
in magazines
such as this,
quite realistic
answers from
an audience
point of view,
has the
underdog sort
of feel about
the answers.
Website and twitter account is used to make
sure the audience think the magazine is up
to date with the 21st century.

11. 3. What kind of Media
Institution would distribute
your media product and why?

12. Text
Who publishes a magazine similar to mine?

14. What other products does IPC
media and Bauer publishing
produce?

15. Other Products?
As you can see from the previous slide that these two
giants in media magazine publishing, produce many
other magazines, including women weekly magazine,
all different genre magazine and even magazines
such as heat.

16. Why would a big institution
choose my magazine?
A big institution may choose
my magazine because it is
quite similar to other
magazines of its genre but
the majority of the content is
completely different and isn’t
the same thing over and
over again, it contains lots of
different things such as
backstage with different
bands, stars and their cars
and the venues which the
bands may be performing at.

17. 4. Who would be the audience
for your media product?

18. Different Audiences?
These types of magazine cover a whole load of
different audiences ranging from a niche market with
the metal magazine, to a colossus of a market with
womans weekly magazines, they also make sure
they’re not appealing to a specific type of audience
such as the unemployed, they vary their magazine out
to appeal to a mass audience.

19. What audience would my
product appeal to?
The audience that my product would mainly appeal to
would probably be the 16-30 year olds, mainly men
due to the colour scheme and the majority of male
content in the magazine, the type of person it would
appeal to would be unemployed, part time employed
or fully employed with a low income, very rarely would
my magazine get sold to an upper class citizen.

20. Who would be the typical
reader of my magazine?
I am 20 years old
I’m in a band
I am unemployed
I want to study
music at
university
I like reading
magazines
I use social
networking a lot

21. 5. What attracted people to my
magazine?
I believe that people may have been attracted to my
magazine because mainly the masthead did stand
out being in quite a bright colour and secondly there
was an unusual competition at the bottom of the
page to attract potential customers.
The colour scheme used is quite noticeable and
attractive.
Model is wearing clothes which are stereotypically
associated with metal bands and artists
Magazine looks as if it is a premium product that
wouldn’t feel as if it was made out of paper like a
children's magazine.

22. Attraction within Contents
• I tried to make the contents page as attractive as
possible because that is really what people see
second when they open the magazine.
• I only used yellow twice in the contents page to try
and attract people with the house style.
• As you can also see I used red quite a lot because it
matched with the “stars and their cars” picture which
would make the potential audience more and more
interested as they had to search for the correct page
number.
• The content is all in black on a white background so
it is very clear and easy for the reader to find,
although at the bottom right hand corner the website
is in red so it is memorable for the reader.
• In the middle of the page I have included “Insanity
this week!” which shows the reader there is different
content every week and it is all different from the
previous week.

23. Attraction within the Double
Page Spread.
• Although at first glance the double page
spread doesn’t seem to be very attractive to
the audience, I have made it appeal to the
target audience.
• I have made sure that there is still some of the
house style in there somewhere with the red
bar at the bottom of the page and the yellow
dotted around the screen in various places.
• I have included the logo for the band over the
lead singers right shoulder so people can
recognise the band.
• I have photo shopped everything out around
the lead singer so the readers can focus on
him and then read the content.
• I have made the title seem very interesting for
people because it is quite odd that money
would ruin someones career instead of make
it better.
• The content is nicely spread out and not too
crammed in.

24. 6. What have you learnt about
technologies from the process
of constructing this product?

25. • I have never done anything magazine
related before in my life so I tried to
keep my techniques simple but still
looking good and professional such as I
didn’t use photoshop or anything to
complicated.
• To edit my photos I mainly used the
photo editing parts of pages and photos
on my phone but I also used a photo
editing app called aviary for all the little
details that are in the photos.
• To do the different fonts and different
effects with the words on the magazine
I just used pages and a website to get
different fonts off which were original
and specific to what i wanted.
• I had never used blogger before I
started doing media as well, so that
was a different experience having to
blog extensively!
Before
After

26. Cropping out backgrounds
• This was one of the most difficult obstacles I
had to face when creating the magazine
purely because I had never done it before and
never thought I would need to, but for the
magazine I really had to.
• I had to crop the background out of all the
photos that I had taken then select the ones
that I thought was correct for wherever in the
magazine I would have to put them.
• For the front cover I had lots of different
thoughts about the image I should use and I
even swapped it around at the last minute
because I thought it looked better.
• For the Contents page, I had to crop out a
similar sort of image, this image I also
changed at the last minute because I thought
it looked a lot better on the contents page
than the previous one.
• For the double page spread, I was always
going to use this image because I had always
thought it was the best one.
Images before cropping

27. 7. Looking back at your preliminary task,
what do you feel you have learnt in the
progression from it to the full product?

28. Progression
• From the previous magazine I designed I believe,
that I have come a long way, in the previous
magazine on the front page, there was no sort of
proper editing the photo and there were bits and
pieces all over the place, the same goes with the
contents page, there was structure to it, but no real
sense of organisation. The photos were good quality
but there was nothing done to improve them.
• On this new magazine that I have designed, I have
used all different techniques and asked lots of
different types of people what they think to it and
each different bit of advice I have taken and tried to
improve my magazine from each bit of advice for
example the front page, there is only one image on
the front cover to keep the reader focused, but on
the contents page there are more images to interest
the reader, and finally on the double page spread,
there is a huge amount of content for the readers to
read. I have used photoshop to crop out the
backgrounds and improve image quality on this
magazine also. I also researched other magazines
of similar genre to see how they designed their
magazines.

29. Comparisons

30. Looking back at your preliminary task,
what do you feel you have learnt in the
progression from it to the full product?
• When looking back at my previous task and thinking that I used to think that something like that used to
appeal to me and I used to be proud of my skills, when I designed that it now makes me think other wise.
• It has made me realise that just because I like it doesn’t mean that other people like it as well, for my
music magazine, there have had to be some compromises due to some feedback that I received from
people, although some of the compromises that I did, I did not like, I am still quite proud of the final
outcome.
• When I see how far my photo editing has come from the previous task it is quite strange to think that I
never actually did any editing apart from changing the opacity of photos, but now I change the contrast,
saturation,shadows etc etc.