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

This is my college magazine that I made at the start of the course..

Since then I have learnt more about the conventions of magazines, more about technology, how to use things such as Photoshop to make my magazine look better and I have a better general idea of how a magazine should look...



Since my preliminary task I have done a lot more research into existing magazines, I have got a better understanding of what draws people to magazines, what would be an appropriate set up for my target audience and what would sell. I have got a better understanding of what colours should be used together and what colours stand out to draw the audiences attention. I have looked at a lot of existing media blogs who have done the same tasks as me to help me get a better understanding of what I would need to do for mine.


Peer feedback I got on one of my front cover drafts:

Positives - all features included -mast head, cover lines etc. Laid out well with a good text positioning. Including a bar code and follows typical conventions.
Negatives - the image doesn't represent the music genre of the magazine. The photo quality could be better. Needs a tease at the bottom to make it more appealing.
As a result of this feedback I changed my main photo and made sure it involved something to do with music, I added something along the bottom and i tried to include a better quality photo.



If i were to do this task again, the things I would do differently are:
Use a female model as I think this would be easier to show the genre of the music magazine as you can change the appearance of a girl more through the make up they are wearing and how their hair is styled etc, so this would help the audience understand the genre of the magazine. It would also mean the magazine would appeal to more people as boys would like seeing a girl on the front and girls would look at her fashion sense etc.
Another thing I would do differently is use different fancier text as this seems to be something people have told me I should have done in my feedback so it obviously means that it would appeal to more people if I did this.
It was useful carrying out the preliminary task because this gave me a basic understanding of what a magazine should look like and the things you should include when creating one. I had to do a lot of research for my college magazine because I didn't know a lot about the conventions of a magazine, so this gave me a head start when I was creating my music magazine as I already had the basic understanding in my head of what one should look like. It was also good because when I had finished my college magazine I was able to look at it and say that if I was going to do it again I would do so many things differently, so I have been able to corporate these ideas into my music magazine.