Jay coursework: Evaluation

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

Going back through my preliminary work I have greatly improved in what I have produced. First of all the camera shots and mise en scene in my photos are a much higher standard that are in a different league when compared to my preliminaries, I put this down to the location we used and to a better camera used and camera skills. There is also an obvious improvement in the models since I researched my target audience I used clothes which fitted the demographic better, when I took the previous photos it was whatever clothes they were wearing on the day. However on the front cover of my final product I have my model’s styled in a specific way eg a vintage brown jacket from a charity shop, skater hoodies and DcMartisns to make it relatable to the genera and audience so that my magazine is unusual and embodies the theme of music and fashion, which would attract more readers/customers to read my magazine and to Bauer. The difference in style is due to my holes in my research when creating my preliminary and only going with my gut instinct, taking the images on plain white background caused me to have to use the wand/lasso tool to cut out the model and awkwardly place it upon my magazine, however contrary to this when I took the images for the real project I used a natural background so that the centerpiece was a nice piece of photography and that it didn't need to be a Frankenstein jumble of images and background, my camera skills also improved and I used more long shots and used the natural light to my advantage whilst as before the artificial lights caused glare, the close ups looked forced, but mainly I was only able to fit in 1 model.

During the preliminary work I felt that my type faces where dreadful since they where the base Photoshop fonts and where not inspired by any other conventions, however this did help me learn for my final product that knowing which fonts are more professional and appropriate this allowed me to make my final product as professional and higher quality as I could. However on my final product I researched what other magazine conventions where appropriate and could let this inspire me, such as developing the clash lay out for the inside and the vice layout for the cover whilst utilizing a similar font to the vintage kerrang!’s. I browsed fonts to see which would suite me on a website called DaFont and then downloaded the font on to the Mac so I could utilize it in lesson. From this I understand the hardship and importance of research and development to allow you to understand what is best for your creation eg which fonts are appropriate and suitable for my products. The organization and placing of the text on my pages is completely different, I did however try to keep it minimalist yet I put the masthead all the way across the top of the page which I found I disliked which caused me to use a different layout of mast head and decided not use scattered boxes since I didn't think it sat on the page very neatly. I Directly measured the conventions of Clash for the purposes of orientation and left a white boarder along the edge of the image so it doesn’t take any concentration away from the main image or text .

The design of my preliminary contents to final content page also shows a lot of improvement. When producing my preliminary I did not consider how many pages a magazine averagely has and only randomly pointed out a few pages, whilst after research I found that the content in which I wanted to use was a similar convention that would list all the pages in the magazine and there for it goes up to about 140+. The layout design of my preliminary magazine is also very poor, since I was just coming accustom to Photoshop on the Mac and also had little knowledge on the layout of content pages especially a school magazine, during my research I found that clash content was very simple and very effective yet I felt like I should add images to that page so that it didn't have lots of negative space.

The preliminary magazines was great to do, to accustom one's self to the technology and help develop the skills I needed, it also helps boost photography skills. which are all important to get a grasp of before creating the real media product which then can be sculpted along side the all important research which would allow anyone from all backgrounds produce a good final media product.

Printing and publishing is usually ran by large company, there are many of these Meredith, ICP and Time inc to name a few these companies create media for a public audience, Bauer is a European media group known for its music publications, the most well known being Mojo the classic rock magazine, Kerrang the wacky magazine focusing on alt and heavy rock/metal and Q the said to be “UK biggest magazine” featuring a vast genera of modern and old These magazines are not fully mainstream; they can be purchased in a variety of stores since they wanted to reach a large audience . Bauer would be appropriate because of its mass amount of popular publications. However magazines like Kerrang and Mojo are usually have clustered and busy covers and contents yet I made a more artsy minimalist magazine yet tried to also have a short catchy name, however these 2 magazines are aimed at a similar age range and to wards people who wouldn’t be considered main stream yet are still different tastes to the music to the music that would feature ‘Stash’,

Kerrang Mojo and Q also feature many adverts which may also be target at my indented audience so the same advertising deal Bauer have can still successfully work, out of the many publishing companies Bauer would be the most lightly to publish “Stash” because of its other magazines . the experience from this successful and experienced company would benefit me allot, however they might be to similar and they might not want to publish it however the is a gap in Bauer printing market.