evaluation of college magazine

AS Media Studies Evaluation

                                          Matthew Nolan

My college magazine follows many conventions of the normal media product. I have included a medium close up of a model as the main image, I have included a masthead that takes up roughly 4 and a half of the page and my main articles are all positioned on the left third of the screen. Also, I have included a barcode, date and issue number and a website. I have also gone against the conventional media magazine by placing the issue number of my magazine on the skyline of my magazine so when it is stacked on the shelves people can straight away see that the magazine is successful by the amount of issues publishes prior to this one. Also my magazine is free so a price isn’t included on the front page. Something else I did that goes against the usual conventions is placing my background image in black and white. My college magazine represents students and teachers that are interested in photography, even people who aren’t students or teachers but are just interested in photography could buy my magazine and be interested it. The magazine includes advice on how to buy the right camera so it doesn’t just include gossip but actual facts and interesting points. My target audience for my magazine would be people interested in photography including; students, teachers and other outside education people interested in photography. I attracted my target audience on my front cover by placing the background image in black and white. By doing this I have attracted the audience’s attention by the fact not many magazines are in black and white so when it’s placed against other magazines that are in colour it will stand out instead of fading into the background. Also, I have placed my writing in a slightly crimson red, this is usually the colour that represents desire or passion, this symbolises people that have a passion for photography. I placed this in colour instead of black and white because it stands out better, rather than colour on colour or black and white on top of a black and white image, and grasps the audience’s attention. Within this product I have used such programmes as Photoshop which means I can manipulate and edit photos that I have taken and made them more visually attractive to the audience. I took these photographs on a still digital camera which meant, instead of using a film camera where I would have had to develop the pictures and scan them in and edit them to make them appropriate to place on my front cover, I can instantly upload them onto a computer and begin editing them. For this project I could have used a programme called ‘prezi’ this is a presentation programme which I would have had to learn how to use this programme and then created a presentation. When I had a small space of time to get everything done in this project I felt that this was a waste of time as I have already uploaded my drafts and images onto my blogger. My blogger was also a new technology that I have used for my project, this is a way to store my drafts and ideas and let people, such as my teacher and peers, to see my progress. Also a search engine such as ‘google’ is an extremely useful technology because it helped me find research on previous magazines similar to mine and help me understand what my magazine cover needed to include.