Final Evauluation

Q1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

The aim of my magazine is to appeal to the age group of 16-25 year olds, if we look at the hip/hop and rap genre today, we can see that most of rap and hip hop is listened to that specific age group. My aim was to appeal to that age group and make the magazine to what they would be interested in, the gender I thought about mainly, was male, because the magazines I had looked at before I chose my genre, the hip hop and rap section mainly applied to the male sector, but on the other hand, it wasn’t just male though, as I looked at an existing magazine of this genre, I realised that gender didn’t really matter because the magazine also applied to females as well.

Females featured advertisements and some pages covered female artists, so I realised the fact that it appealed to both genders but I thought it would be easier for me to cover mainly males.

On the right I have an image of my typical person in my target audience, straight away, I can recognize that this person is into rap or hip-hop music genre, the first impression, I can get or anyone may get is that he has very urban look to him and he would be interested in this genre. The attitude he is showing in the image, shows us that he has been inspired by the rapper look with the, chains the style of clothing etc.

Q5. How did you attract/address your audience?

The main point of making your magazine front covers creative is to attract, meanwhile the main feature of a front cover is the magazine masthead. my masthead was called TripTunz, the masthead I think should be  a well thought out one to attract the audience. My masthead had to appeal to the rap and hip hop genre, so I had to think of an urban type of name so I came up with Triptunz.  The front cover image was a image of an MC, the  MC stood out and looked unique, meanwhile I wanted him to have a pose of him which looked appealing to the  audience. After the final photo shoot of the MC, I had the choice of few images. The one that has been chosen on the front cover I think was the most effective one which would attract the audience. The way the MC is standing and his hand actions, attract the audience , the reason being the MC’s hands aim towards the reader, giving the impression the y are being involved.

The contents page I kept really simple, with a background and some text featuring in the magazine and double page spread. Most other magazines I saw the magazine contents page show all the pages in the magazine, but I wanted to make the reader more interested or more anxious what’s to be inside. So I used a technique which was used by XXL magazine which was  just to use the method of showing what’s featuring on that certain edition, from this I thought this was a good technique to use so that the reader gets more interested into wanting to read it.

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

While constructing my magazine, I have learned new things on the three different programs, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. When using Photoshop, I edited images that I had took for my front cover, Photoshop helps images mainly look better, and lets you change various aspects of the picture to change. In Photoshop one of the main points I had learned is how to adjust a images brightness and exposure. This was needed for pictures which were taken by me for my front cover, due to lighting using brightness on Photoshop helps tweak the images to make them look substantially better on the magazine. The main advantage I had was that I had used Photoshop before and I had a good idea, of how it works and the features it has.

For my main double page spread we used a program called InDesign this program is used for building up pages together, adding texts and images. This program was completely new to me. Making my double page spread on here was not easy; firstly I didn’t know how everything worked. When I received helped form the teacher, gradually I improved in InDesign, the main benefit I had realised for using in InDesign was that joining the whole double page spread together was easy to put together on InDesign. The reason being was that the pages on InDesign have guidelines to help the user, by telling the user where to add text or images, I thought this was one of the main aspects which helped me a lot to make my final DPS.

Overall I’ve realised using programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign has helped me construct my magazine together using programs like this helped me with the presentation of my work substantially because they help you arrange things like images and text together accordingly how you as the user wants them. Meanwhile using blogging websites has helped me present my work such as the initial research of project and the design stage, on the blog, from this other people like other students and the teacher can access my work. So after using blogger I think that it’s such a useful program that can use to present or share work or thoughts most importantly to others.  

Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

The preliminary task was done before the actual magazine or research was done. The prelim task was only to design a front cover and contents page for a college magazine. In my prelim I wanted to keep it simple and do more advanced things on the actual main magazine, which I have completed. My prelim front cover was done on Illustrator, I found illustrator easy to use so I did my preliminary task on illustrator. My prelim front cover was simply designed, from my final prelim front cover I had a better idea from the beginning, of how my page was going to be laid out on my final front cover. From the prelim, I had played with the main masthead and other text on the page to make the page look more appealing to college students. My final background image was a students reading a book, and other college members in the background,  I thought that was a good image to have on the prelim front cover, because it shows college life.

In my view I think that by doing the prelim task, was a really good reason why we did it because it gave me a big insight, to how my final front cover, contents page and double page spread, should be arranged and most importantly get the attraction of a reader.

Another point I had learned from my prelim task, was that I had to work quickly and efficiently to finish the three tasks, front cover, contents page and double page spread, managing each task carefully was essential in enable to finish the magazine. Comparing my final front cover to my prelim, the final front cover does look completely different due to the genre, but I learned a lot of points, which I used 

in final outcome

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Conclusion

Looking at my overall magazines success, I think that I achieved what I wanted in some aspects. The main successful final product I liked was my front cover; I think that I achieved exactly what I wanted from the front cover. Looking at existing magazines like XXL, I wanted an outcome similar to them, they have their typical rapper or hip hop star, I wanted something similar, which stood out. I think I had done this target properly and up to a good standard.  The front cover in my view would attract readers from the genre almost certainly, I managed to achieve a good quality front cover which would attract customers to buy my magazine. In my three pieces I think I have used a lot of creativity, which differs from other magazines.

Using media was limited to evaluate, due to time, I didn’t use much use of media. Meanwhile using programs such as prezi and PowerPoint, have enhanced my ability to use both further. Doing one of my evaluation questions on prezi for the first time was  quite tricky, the reason being navigating through the program was difficult for me. But with practice and progression, I made one of my evaluation questions on prezi, the final outcome, was really well designed. By using prezi I have improved my skills of using different types of media more. PowerPoint I had used before, but using it as a technique to evaluate my work was interesting. Organising the evaluation on different slides was a challenge for me, the most difficult bit was that I didn’t really know what to put on what slide and didn’t know how to organise the whole evaluation question. Eventually I overcome that problem and did one of my evaluation questions on PowerPoint. For the other evaluation questions I did a lot of written work, looking at spelling I think that was not the problem meanwhile punctuation was a problem, using different types of punctuation should be used more often and not just the same types like commas and full stops. I think using variety like semi colons and commas in the right places is essential to improve my writing technique.