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

When I first began this project my knowledge of different types of magazines, the designs that are used and the process that is gone through to produce a magazine was very limited. Throughout the project, starting with the preliminary task right through to the final versions of the main task, I believe that my skills in each of these areas has increased dramatically.

The Preliminary Task was the first media product that I have ever produced, and it was my task to produce a front cover and a contents page for a school magazine. I had done some research into school magazines and what types of things are included in this type of magazine.

I began producing my front cover in Corel Draw, this would be the first time that I used this programme to produce anything and was also the first time that I was able to experiment with any of the specialist features that are included in this programme, my knowledge of this programme started off as very limited but throughout the process of producing my front cover and contents page my knowledge and skills grew dramatically. The front cover included a picture of the Sixth Form Centre as the main cover photo, a photo of a student, other articles, a puff, a plug and a bar code. This was put together with a simple layout with simple features and was made by following my plan that I have made before I started.

The planning and research of magazines is something that is of massive importance, and when completing my preliminary task and final pieces I saw a difference between the times spent on doing this.
During my preliminary task, I spent very little time on planning and research due to the amount of time we had to complete this task, I looked at just a few other examples of school magazine front covers, got the ideas that I wanted to include and then set to complete the front cover and the contents page.
When it came to completing my final pieces for a music magazine (front cover, double page spread and contents page) the amount of planning and research I done saw a big increase.


Looking back at my front cover that I produced for my preliminary task, I can see that the attention to detail is of much lesser quality than the attention that I put in to my main task. In many ways the layout is similar with an image being the background and other thing including the plug being very similar. I also noticed that I hadn’t including a price or an issue date in my preliminary task, this is something that I had to make sure that I included in my main task as it is a very important part of any magazine.

The Main Task was to produce three parts of a music magazine, a front cover, a double-page spread and a contents page for a magazine aimed at a target audience of your choice. After research the magazine market and not finding any magazines directly related at boys of an age of 11-16, I decided upon producing a magazine for this target audience.

I used Corel Draw to produce my products as I started to learn how to use the majority of the features included in the programme and I thought that I used them well due to the ever-growing experience I had gained.

Due to the larger amount of time I had to produce my main task products than I did for my preliminary tasks, I was able to take a lot more care in choosing the right images to make sure I was choosing the best for the eventual decoder’s of my magazine.  

After producing the first version of my main task magazine, I decided upon producing a questionnaire to ask students in my class a series of questions to gather feedback to who they thought the product was aimed at. From the feedback I got I was able to change a few things and make a few things stronger in order to make sure that my final version of my magazine was correct in every way. 

The importance of audience feedback is critical in successfully producing a media product. The way in which I obtained this feedback was to ask my audience to comment on my blog posts, and these are some of the results I got: 

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

While I have been producing my music magazine I have learnt a lot about many different programmes on the computers and the technology involved during the design process of my magazine. From the initial plans that were produced very basically to the most advanced ICT skills that needed to be used to get to the final production stage. Due to this process I have managed to pick a lot of skills in programmes that I may never of necessarily used had I not gone through this whole process. 

One of the main things that I have used for my overall Media Studies project is Blogger.com.

Blogger is my online blog that has been used to display all of my work that I have produced during this process of constructing my media product. I had never had any previous experience of Blogger before so every feature that I have used in my project has been new to me.

Design: The first task I had, was to choose a design for my blog, I decided to go for a design that was very simple and easy to read and a design where every feature was there and easy to navigate between.

Labels: I used labels on my blog to make it easier for the viewer of my blog to navigate through each section of the project that I have included on the blog. The labels that I used were: “Main Task”, “Planning”, “Preliminary Task”. “Research”, “Target Audience” and “Evaluation”. Every time I uploaded a new post onto my blog, I would select a label, or labels, for my work to go in to. The labels are able to view on the right hand side of my blog for the user to select which section they want to look at when and if they need to.

Pictures: Another thing that I had to do was to upload image files to my blog, I had never done this before but it wasn’t a struggle for me as it was very easy to use.

For the actual design process of my media product I had to use a specialist design programme. I decided upon using Corel Draw, as it seemed to have many features on there that seemed easy to use and yet seemed very professional.

Although I had never used Corel Draw before I very quickly became used to the programme and I knew what I was doing. I used this programme to produce all three products of my music magazine; my front cover, my double page spread and my contents. This programme was very easy to use and was suitable for what I had intended to do, change things around when they I thought that they were not in the correct position, it was also very easy to import, resize, re-position and change the order of images into the Corel Draw document.

The only downside to this programme that I found was that I seemed very hard to crop images to the size that was correct for my magazine, after searching for how to do it and ultimately failing, I decided to use a different programme in Adobe Photoshop Elements as I was already experienced in using this programme and knew how to crop images quickly and easily.

As I say, this was the only downside to Corel Draw.

The images that I used in my magazine were taken on my camera phone; the phone has a 12 megapixel camera so I ensured that the quality was that of a high one. Another feature of this camera was that it allowed me to be able to zoom in quite a lot to take a picture without it actually decreasing the quality of the picture being taken. I had used this camera before so I found it very easy to use as I had experience in using it. The picture that I used for my double page spread originally was very bright, I was able to decrease the brightness of this photo by editing it on a programme called Photo Tricks on my Apple iMac.

 

I also used the Internet quite a lot, the only reason that I used this was to be able to do research on different types of magazine and find out every bit of information that I needed. I feel that my research defiantly paid off as I feel that due to my analysing of other magazine, my media products have included styles and features that established magazines also include.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Media institutions form a large part of the overall production and distribution process of magazines, distributions hundreds of thousands of magazines around the UK every day. I have created a revenue projection for my magazine which can be seen below.

Each individual institution often focus on a different type of magazine, for example, a particular institution would publish several magazines to do with fashion and another would publish magazines about lifestyles.

After looking at different websites to see what media institution would be best to suited to publishing my music magazine, “beats.” I came to the conclusion that I would use the media institution ‘Conde Nast’. Conde Nast is an American company and is part of the Company Advance Publications, it was founded in 1905 and is currently one of the most popular publishing houses in the world.
This is the Conde Nast homepage when I hovered over the "media brands" tab, it shows the most popular and most credible magazines that they publish.

Even though Conde Nast doesn’t currently own any music magazine, I believe that the strength of my magazine will enable it to be a strong competitor in the market while being published by Conde Nast. Another reason that I believe Conde Nast is the right distributor for my music magazine is because I believe that due to my magazine being different from anything that they currently distribute it will create a new line of marketing for the institution, I believe that it will work well up against the lifestyle and celebrity magazines that they already are producing.
This is the Conde Nast website URL: http://www.condenast.com/

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Representation is the way of communicating to a decoder using signs and symbols. The types of signs that are used are images, text and sometimes videos. In every media product there will be signs and symbols for the encoder to be able to communicate with the decoders. No representation is completely true with all signs and symbols going through a mediation process before being used in a media product.

My media product, “beats.” magazine, represents the social groups of young men. in terms of social stratification, even though I would consider my magazine to be one that includes music from a variety of music artists and artists from different backgrounds.

The types of people that I am targeting are these types of people (this is the picture that  I used for my double page spread) :

I had to produce three parts of a music magazine, a front cover, a double page spread and a contents page. In each of these parts I had a challenge of fitting everything that I wanted to include in my music magazine. It meant that I had to select the best images and signs to use to be able to gain the decoder’s interest in my magazine.

During the design process I used intertextuality to help me decide which design to use that would be most suitable for my target audience. I researched other existing magazines to see what type of designs and signs that were used, even though I couldn’t find any magazines that were targeted at the same audience I am targeting at I still managed to gather enough information to get the right design, that suited my target audience, for my music magazine.

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

Every media product follows a guideline that allows it to be designed in the way that decoders will be familiar with. All media products are put into categories that will target a specific audience and the audience should easily be able to recognise the use of key elements and the techniques used by the encoder, the categories are more commonly known as genres. An example of a genre is a horror film, the encoder (director) of a horror film will consider using similar settings and dialogue, they may even consider similar storylines as previous horror films that have been produced, this is an example of intertextuality – links have been made from previous media texts to produce a new one. The media product that I have produced, a music magazine, generally follows the same pattern; they will use the same techniques of including similar storylines and interviews that would generally involve asking the same questions that would best suit the target audience.


The codes and conventions of a typical magazine are as follows (this is for the magazine FourFourTwo):

Key elements of music magazine include:

- The main focus of the magazine being around one type/genre of music, the encoder would use this type of music to base the design of the magazine around and base things on what the decoder would expect to see.

- Another typical feature of a music magazine is an article about a well-known musician or a particular band, the article will be based around either the music the artist produces or something interesting that has happened in their personal life.

- A tag line or a puff to show how good the magazine is or any awards that the magazine has won, I have included this feature on my front cover in the form of a puff. This will represent the magazine and the popularity of it to the decoder allowing them to understand how good the magazine is and should attract them to purchase the magazine.

- As my target audience is a young one, I have included an offer of free posters of all of the featured band members. An offer is generally included in most magazines but are generally are better offer due to the target audience. My offer is a small offer but it targets my audience in the way I saw necessary.

- Any type of product that is being sold ever will include a barcode somewhere on the packaging, my music magazine does include a bar code in the bottom left hand corner of the front cover. I chose this position on the page as it doesn’t interfere with the picture at all and it doesn’t get in the way of any text. Also included with the bar code, is the issue number of the magazine, the price of the magazine and the issue date of the product, these are included with the bar code as, after researching front covers I found that the majority of them did the same thing as I have done.

- Finally, the most important feature on the front cover of the magazine is the masthead. The masthead is the title of the magazine is the word ‘beats.’ I used this title as it relates to music. The masthead is bold and would be the first thing that the consumers sees when looking at the magazine rack in a store. 

How did you attract/address your audience?

I considered the modes of address one of the most important while designing my music magazine media product. The magazine needed to be able to communicate in a way that’s suitable for my target audience of young teenage boys. To do this successfully, I had to make assumptions about my target audience, such as annual income, interests and hobbies. These assumptions about the target audience can sometimes be detected while decoding a piece of media text.


I decided upon creating a questionnaire to be answered by people that I thought to be in my target audience to find out what they thought of like and would be interested in. The results of the questionnaire were what I used to create a lifestyle profile for the imaginary entity. This questionnaire and it's results can be found here: http://alevelmediabmm.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/magazine-questionnaire.html

I attracted/addressed my audience by including a puff and a plug on the front cover of my music magazine, “beats.”, the puff that I used was “the ultimate music magazine.” I included this puff to attract the audience that may pick up my product to have a look and consider buying it; this puff is put on the magazine to entice the customer to want to buy the product even more. I also included a plug on my music magazine, I included this plug as after researching and finding that the majority of magazines that existed and are established in the market included a plug, the plug I included was “free posters of all the band members”.

I decided upon this being my plug as it fits the target audience’s age perfectly, if I included a competition for a free holiday then this would not be right for my target audience and would be more suited to middle-aged males and middle-aged females.

The mode of address is something that is aimed directly at my target audience, I haven’t spelt any of the words wrong but what I have done is I have used incorrect grammar by not including any capital letters on my front cover, contents page or the double page spread .





I have done this to relate to the “slang” text that many people of my target audience’s age use on social networking sites such as “Facebook” and “Twitter”.

The font I have used for my masthead is a font that I believe relates to my target audience, the colour differs on my front cover between black text with a white outline and white text with a black outline. The font I used for my main cover article, puff and plug is a basic text, I decided to use this text as I want the text to be easy and clear to understand.

On the front cover of my magazine, I used a picture that took up the majority of the page that I used was a picture that was to attract my target audience; the picture includes a music group who look to be in their late teens / early twenties, I decided to use this image as I believe that they would be able to relate to that type of music artist and as the band are a young band they can relate to the target audience even more. I had originally used a different image but due to my masthead being quite bold, the picture would have lost its “boldness” so I decided that that picture maybe better for my double page spread.

On the double page spread, I included one image that takes up one side of the page; the image includes the band members on a set of stairs, putting on poses that signify the ‘typical’ boy band pose, this image was edited as it was originally very bright and didn’t look very good along side the white page that was directly next to it. I also used a title of a quote for my double page spread as when I was researching previous double page spreads I liked the idea of having a quote as a title.