This document summarizes the learning and skills gained by the author in creating a music magazine from designing the front cover to the full product. The author learned photo editing skills in Photoshop like using selection tools, layers, effects, and maintaining color consistency. They also learned the importance of layout, organization, and purposeful image placement from their preliminary school magazine task. Creating the full music magazine helped the author learn how to make their publication stand out from others on similar topics.

1. In what ways does your music magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of existing music magazines? I think that my magazine takes inspiration from ‘RWD’. It uses similar conventions for the cover in particular as they list the artists in the issue, I liked this idea and so took the inspiration for it, listing the artist’s. Also, RWD appeals to an audience of whom would describe themselves as ‘Simple’ and so I have kept my magazine as simple as possible, but keeping it relevant to what I’m promoting through my magazine at the same time. Also, I noticed that the two magazines that I took inspiration from had no specific colour to single out a gender or a very specific age group.

2. How does your music magazine represent particular social groups? I think that my music magazine represents a young, black youth culture, as this is my target audience. I think that it also reaches out to people who are interested in young people's views on the crisis of the political world and how they speak out about it as this is what grime music is all about. I think that my feature article also helps to represent social groups as I have interviewed and written about a young, undiscovered group of artist’s. Coincidently, this group is majority black and so immediately relatable to my target audience. Also, the group is of roughly the same age group as my target audience and so my reader’s are finding out about someone they can easily relate to as well as look up to within their own social group creating a positive vibe among my target audience, unlike the publicity given to them my the reporting media.

3. What kind of institution might distribute your music magazine and why? I think that newsagent’s and music specialist shops would distribute my magazine as then it is available easily, but also it shows that my audience has a key interest in the genre of music by buying it form a music specific shop rather than their local supermarket, where I think that my audience would not see my magazine as a serious publication.

4. Who would be the audience for your music magazine? I think the audience for my magazine would be a fairly young audience as ‘Grime’ is written and mainly supported by young people, so it engages a common interest. I think it also has the factor of enticing young people to read it as the majority of the artist’s are fairly young and the main feature is on a group considered very young to the rest of the music industry, but only marginally young in the world of grime, showing that my target audience is quite young and supportive of young artist’s.

5. How did you attract/ address the audience for your music publication? To attract my audience, I asked a group of friends both from in and out of college what they find a common interest in grime. From this I found that they all believed that new artist’s with a different organisation of words and a different meaning tot hem was what made the genre of an interest. So, by using these spoken results, (which I did not think to tabulate, but use more for my own personal research) I decided that having the main feature on a not-very-heard-about group was a good way to spread this message, but also to relate my magazine to artist’s well known with in the genre and awards they had won in the ‘MOBO’s’ to show that my magazine was up-to-date and to show that it didn’t consist of things that were irrelevant to the industry at this time.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? Form constructing this product, I have learnt about different tools on photo shop, such as; The lasso tool Layering Linking layering Adding affects such as drop-shadow’s to an image How to change the colouring and texture of an image How to keep the colours on a page consistent By learning these different skills, I have learnt how to make my magazine completely different to someone with the same idea and the same purpose, yet make successfully promote different artist’s with a different purpose with in the genre.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, of designing the front page of a school magazine, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? I think that form the preliminary task, I learnt that I didn’t like the layout and the way my image was just a block, I knew that I wanted to have a cut-out image to show more skill through photo shop and to attempt to make my final music magazine look more like an actual magazine on sale. I also knew that I wanted to vary the font size more looking back, to give my front cover a different element and show what my audience should hopefully be engaged with on my front cover. I learnt that to achieve a successful contents page, I wanted to keep images, but to make my contents page look and feel more organised rather that scatter images to go next to a piece of test with out a thought. Finally, I learnt that I wanted the background to my images to be simple or have a specific purpose to the text that they were relating to, to show that I had thought behind the image rather than just pasting it in to add a different element to my page.