Final Evaluation 7

Evaluation Question 7

Final Evaluation 6

Evaluation Question 6

Final Evaluation 5

Final Question 4

Final Question 3

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

After looking at the main institutions that are involved with publishing and distributing music magazines I have decided to use Bauer Media to be the publisher. This company are already being successful with the magazine MOJO, in the first half of 2012, MOJO sold a staggering 84,560 copies and has seen rises in sales ever since. 

(taken from the Bauer Media website)

"MOJO is the world’s largest UK music magazine, delivering a monthly dose of world class journalism and iconic photography to an audience of extremely passionate music consumers. If you’re featured in MOJO, you matter."

I think that there is a gap in the market for a mainstream, weekly magazine aimed at 17-30 yea olds therefore I feel that Bauer Media could make my magazine successful. Bauer Media also have MOJO as an online magazine which I could use with my magazine. As my social groups of Indie Scenesters and Scene Kids are often downloading things onto iPads and iPhones and looking at things online they may prefer a digital version as apposed to buying a paper copy from a local newsagents like anybody could do. Social media is also a huge part of my target social groups, especially scene kids, which could be another way in which my magazine gets publicised. 

With the great name and well known success Bauer Media has I think that they could take my magazine and create a great name for and continue their thriving reputation by filling the ago in the market with my magazine. 

Final Evaluation 2

Final Evaluation 1

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

Before starting the process of making our own magazines, as research we looked at magazines that already exist, analysed the typical conventions and used them as style models. During the research and planning stage of the coursework I used style models from the same music genre (indie rock) that I am using for my magazine. The style models that I  used were predominately MOJO and NME. I have tried to incorporate several conventions that both magazines use as they are both similar magazines to the magazine I produced. 

Cover Page

For the title I used a simple and conventional looking font called 'Freshman' to give my magazine the classy look and feel I wanted. I chose this font because it is closet thing I could find to my first style model NME. I used a black and white Wob instead of red on white as I thought that for my magazine this would be too bright and may stand out to look out of place. Although the style model, NME sometimes change the colour they use for different issues I decided to use plain black and white title so that I wasn't faced with issues that they may face such as clashing colours and colour combinations that don't fit. I thought that using a black and white wob for the title is a safe option and eliminates any issues I may have had with colour clashes. Throughout the magazine I wanted to keep the font styles consistent and did so with success. I chose to position my writing on the left side of the page similar to my style models. I also chose to place 'Ruban Royal' over the central image because after trying to position it elsewhere, on either side of the image I didn't feel like it worked. I played around with the positioning and ended up trying it over the image and it worked straight away and also fits in with my style models layout and design. I also found a couple of other examples where text is covering the image and where the image is place in the centre of the page and not slightly to one side. 

In terms of positioning, I positioned my title in the top left hand corner the same as NME because I thought that this looked good on their issues and that it could be seen as a classic convention used by the NME. As the NME is also a mainstream magazine, similar to the ideas of mine I thought it'd be a good idea to use theirs as a style model to see how a successful magazine uses conventions like this. I tried to incorporate the positioning of how MOJO have their title but in the end found it too difficult to work around and saw that it didn't look as good as I had wanted, I don't know whether finding it too difficult was down to my skill levels using software such as Photoshop or that the position itself was hard to master. 

I chose to have my models image crisp and as clean as i could get him to look so that it would be a representation of the 'Mod' kind of look as they are all clean cut. I chose to have him in plain clothing and wearing a Fred Perry polo shirt because of the importance influence that the brand has within this style image. I chose to position the image slightly off centre as apposed to one of my style models, MOJO that choose to position their images as dead central. This could be seen as a challenge of conventions as there are not many magazine that chose to have their artists off centre. Looking at other magazines I couldn't find many at all that didn't have the artist central to the page. Surprisingly I only found that one of my style models (the NME) used this off central image style in only a small number of issues. 

Throughout my magazine i tried to use the same style models so that my magazine has consistency throughout and that it fits together. I tried to use MOJO magazine as much as I could because I feel as if its the same style as mine.

Contents

I love the style of MOJO's cover pages and the range of designs that they have. The main body and positioning of the title are rather consistent throughout but the vary in imagery and styling around them. For example, the image below of Florence and The Machine, the text is curved around her body and she is in front of the mast head within the page, where as the other page that is more like mine has a box where the text is positioned and the image is fits around that box. 

With my contents page I incorporated the idea of having 'CONTENTS' as the mast head and to have the locations as 'LONDON, NEW YORK, LIVERPOOL' to show the movement of my artist. My artist is from Liverpool and is travelling the world, playing in places in London and supporting Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane on their world tours. I trie
d to make my artist as real as possible and have added background information about him which is my justification for making these decisions. 

In terms of colour i tried to keep the same colour scheme throughout the magazine which is the reasoning for predominately using the colours, red, black and white. I think that keeping this constant colour scheme adds to the consistency of the magazine and ties it all in together. I chose to use a black and white, or sepia image because I knew before I started to construct my magazine I wanted to include a colourless image into it somewhere because I knew that my style models did the same. I chose to controversially use the black and white image on the contents page instead of where you would typically see it, on the double page spread, because I thought that the colour schemes would work better instead of using the navy coloured shirt along side the red on shut a small and close scaled image.

Double Page Spread

For my double page spread I haven't followed the same style my model  used as religiously as I did for the contents but have incorporated the majority of the same conventions that MOJO did. I chose to use the same layout for the article side of the spread but for the image I used one that was not as close up as the one I based it on. For the ones that I looked at the colour scheme of black, white and blue have been used repeatedly but as my colour scheme is different I stuck to my ideas of having red, white and black. 

The lighting in each of the ones I looked at made the photo look darker than it was which I didn't think would look right if used on mine. I chose to use a image that included shadow as I don't see many magazines that use this convention. The slight shadow gives the photo edge and the photo itself is more expressionless than the ones I used as style models.