Gemma O'Donovan created a magazine as part of her Foundation Portfolio in Media Studies course. Over several months, she drafted designs, researched conventions of existing magazines in her genre, took photos, and produced the content and layout for her magazine. This included a front cover, contents page, double page interview spread, and completion of her evaluative blog and tasks to assess her work.

1. St. Paul’s Catholic College 64770
Candidate Name: GemmaO’Donovan
Candidate Number: 6715
Unit G321: Foundation Portfolio in Media Studies
Schedule
Week Beginning Work Completed
Summer Holidays In the summer holidays, I created my hand drawn drafts for my
preliminary task of making a front cover and contents page of a
magazine for my school. I picked a colour scheme so that would
guide me for when I was creating the magazine when I’m back in
college.
Monday 8th September When I got back to college, I looked at my hand drawn drafts and
analysed it and completed the rest of them.
Monday 15th September I started my logbook; my logbook’s aim was to look into
publishing and well established magazines so that I can make
mine look as popular, common and well established as published

2. magazines today. This gave me the chance to look at magazines
and see what I could repeat in my own work. I also looked into
my magazine of inspiration,which I decided was ‘Elektro’
because it focused on my kind of music and I liked the layouts
and what was used in their own production.
Monday 29th September On this date, I looked into different genres of music magazines.
There were many genres I could pick from including Indie rock,
Electro, pop, R&B. I chose electro and deep house because I feel
as I can relate to this one most because I love this genre and
always listen to it therefore there are lots I can write about.
Monday 6th October Throughout September, I completed my logbook and finished on
this date by looking at target audiences and researching what
conventions certain magazines would use in order to attract and
engage the audience for them to buy the magazine. The
consumers are the ones who need to be attracted most, and I
explained in my logbook, how Katz, Maslow and Hartley attract
the audience.
Monday 13th October I started my actual production and making my magazine. I
started my front cover. I did media studies at GCSE so I knew how
to use Photoshop already so it was fairly easy to get to grips with
again. I started my making my basic layout and looking at
different fonts I thought could have potential. At this time I also
started taking photographs for my magazine. I had planned to
use a big image so that it stood out against anything else on the
page, because I feel as if the main central image is the unique

3. selling point of any magazine.
Monday 20st October Today I completed my magazines front cover by placing my
image in for the front cover. I was pleased with how the photo
shoot turned out because all the photos could interlink
throughout the whole magazine including the contents page and
double page spread.
Half Term
Monday 3th November Today I began creating my contents page. I made the basic layout
including background colours and put all the cover lines down
where I wanted them, which was to the side where it would be
clear and neat to where you’d have to look for the stories that
were included.
Monday 10th November Today I created my puff promotion and my editorial. I created a
quiz to have to the left of the page, opposite all of my cover lines. I
also created my editorial, which is a brief welcoming to the
magazine to also engage the audience and make the magazine
seem welcoming and friendly.
Monday 17th November Today I completed my contents page my adding in all of my
photographs that I wanted to include. I included another
photograph for my cover line so that it would switch it up and not
look the same.
Monday 24th November Today I wrote up my double page spread interview. I decided I
was going to write my interview on Duke Dumont because he’s a
well known star in the genre of music and industry.

4. Monday 1nd December On this date, I placed in the image I was going to use and made
sure it took up the whole page like I wanted it to. I loved how the
image looked on the page because it was big and stood out. I liked
everything about it, from the way it was layed out to the facial
expression of the model I used.
Monday 8th December Today I used the pen tool to make the shape of where my
interview was going to go. This was a fairly easy task and didn’t
take long. I then placed my interview in and I was pleased and
satisfied with the way it looked on the page.
Monday 15th December On this date, I completed my double page spread by finishingoff
the small details like convergence, and adding in page numbers.
This didn’t take me very long as it was only the small details that
I had to complete in order for my work to be up to standard.
Christmas Holidays
Monday 5th January Now that I had completed all my production work, I had to
evaluate it and analyse it. I made a start to it and looked at
different ways in which media institutions distributetheir
products,and how certain institutions attract their audience.
Monday 12th January I evaluated my preliminary task and explained how I could have
made it better and what I learned from even doing the
preliminary task and how it helped.
Monday 19th January I analysed each one of my pages and drew arrows coming off it to
show where all the conventions are on my pages. It shows how I
have repeated many conventions from established magazines to

5. make mine look as established as possible.
Monday 9th February I interviewed 3 people of my target audience, and recorded them
talking about each of my magazine pages. This was a very
interactive task and through this,I got very effective pieces of
information and views on my work.
Monday 16th February I posted JPEG images of my magazines onto Facebook so that I
could get feedback from a range of people to see what they
thought of my magazine. I got lots of feedback and uploaded it all
into my evaluation to show evidence of feedback.
Monday 23 February I made an account on word press and made a start to my blog and
made it my own by changing the heading and colours. It was
difficult to understand at the start however once I got to grips
with where everything was placed, it was fine and I found it a
very easy task to upload.
Monday 2nd March I completed my blog and everything had been uploaded and I
wrote comments on everything that I had posted.