1. Evaluation draft answers
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions for real media products?
There are many ways in which you can follow a real media product and if
you do it makes the task a lot easier if you do so. There are many things
that stand out in a magazine for example to title, if you make the title
stand out it is going to make people buy the magazine, maybe just because
the front cover looks good, this is especially with the younger generations
how they pick things up because they are pretty or because they stand out
and they are interested. My name IT was named that because it was easy
to remember and it was short and simple. I also thought it was a good
way of saying that the magazine was ‘it’ it had all the in stuff and it was
the magazine that people wanted to buy. I didn’t chose to have a skyline
as I didn’t want to make the magazine look too busy and there was simply
not room for it as my photo took up all the room from top to bottom. As
my name for my magazine is short and simple I didn’t want it in the
middle of the page at the top because it was short I thought it was better
to put in the corner of the magazine, other magazines do this such as Q
magazine, because it is short it would not look right if it was in the middle
of the page, it drags the attention of the reader in if it is at the corner or
the page. I would also never move where the title is on the page if there
was another issue that was brought out I think it should stay in the same
place and people will know where to look if they are looking for the
magazine. I think the information on the front of the magazine is vital, it is
what grabs the read and pulls them in, if you have amazing story lines on
the front cover you need to make sure that they are so interesting that
people do not even think about it and just buy the magazine, if the
magazine has interesting stories every month it means that people are
going to buy it every month, purely for the story lines and the celebrities
that are inside the story. It is harder creating a magazine that is music
based and I think that is one thing that I struggled on when it came to
making my magazine, I would of preferred to do a gossip magazine,
however it was good to add a musical twist on my magazine. My idea for
my magazine was to create a magazine that was about music and what
had happened in the past month but also keep it quite art-y and make
people buy it for the fact that it was pretty and that it drew the audience
in. There are other things that I have used things such as the issue
number and the date of the issue, other things such as the barcode, every
real magazine has a barcode, this was a good affect to give my magazine
and make it look like a real media product. Another thing I made look like
a real media product was the huge story line, the double page spread
story was a lot bigger than the other stories, it caught the readers
attention (I hope) and would hopefully make people pick up the magazine
as the main story was on a celebrity. Another thing I added was the ‘free
CD’ a lot of magazine put freebees in their magazine and it make the sales
of the magazine go up as sometimes people just buy for the CD, however
they may end up liking the magazine and buying it continuously, which is
good for sales of the magazine. Another convention I have also used is
2. putting the price on the magazine, this is a vital part of the magazine, the
price may or may not put people off buying it, but you need to make sure
that the price of the magazine is a good price for what is included in the
magazine and what you get with it.
There are many things I have developed on my media product for
example, when I was looking for ideas for my magazine and looking at
real media products I came across blend magazine, I like the idea of their
magazine, it was a fashion magazine but I liked their take on it, the fact
that it was about fashion but it was very art-y and had a artist twist to it
but inside the magazine it was full of skinny models. I took this idea and
expanded on it, I liked the idea of it and the layout, my first idea was going
to be that I copied off this idea to a T but I suddenly changed my mind
when it came to actually putting my magazine together and I realised it
didn’t work for my genre of magazine, Blend magazine looked better
because they were professional models and the company was famous for
being an artist fashion magazine. I got rid of having a small picture and
made it bigger making it cover the full of the front page, so it drew the
audience in and made the titles stand out more, I didn’t want the photos
that I had taken to be tiny and for people to have to squint to be able to
see them so I made it 100% bigger and realised that it looked so much
better, then developed even further and edited the photo and didn’t have
a line around it like Blend magazine did. The only thing I ended up taking
for Blend Magazine was the half a picture idea, Blend magazine change
that image every issue and change the photo depending on the central
image.
