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:
No comments:
Post a Comment