Media Magazine Front Cover Evaluation
The brief I was set was to create a college magazine front cover for the college I attend, Wyke 6th Form, as well as a mock up draft for it’s content page. Included in the making of the magazine front cover and mock up of the content page I had to think of my own ideas, take photos as well as editing them myself and creating my own ideas. For this brief I was set a target audience of teenagers aged 16-19, the average age of a college student.
Unlike my last media assignment, I kept my mind open to explore different ideas for my magazine front cover. I started off however with research as I thought this would be the best way in which to get ideas for my own magazine. I annotated and researched two contrasting magazine front covers learning what codes and conventions they both had within the front cover. I learnt a lot from this, as I learnt what was needed to be included on a front cover of a magazine for example; a barcode, price, front cover photo, features included in the magazine, etc. Also, from doing this research I learnt not just the good things about their front covers, but also the bad things which I needed to make sure I didn’t include onto my magazine. For example; bad colour schemes, un-linking photos, etc.
After code and convention magazine front cover research, I started to research different magazine front covers from where I would get my inspiration from. I found inspiration from a college magazine which included politics on the front cover, using badges to ‘show off’ as it were the political issues in the college that the magazine was being sold at. This gave me great inspiration as I have personally took politics at college myself and so is a huge interest of mine. Due to this, I decided at that point to include politics on my front cover of my college magazine. After deciding this, I went onto the BBC website and researched different political stories. When doing this, I had to keep my target audience in my mind as I did not want to include stories that would bore my target audience, as stereotypically, teenagers are not interested in politics. I decided to include stories such as the university funds going up and the possibility of EMA benefits being cut. The reason I included these stories was because of the fact these are stories that my target audience can relate to as these are problems that are going to effect them personally, especially if they receive EMA and/or are going to go to university.
When taking photos for my college magazine, I decided to ask my friend who is in my media class to be my model. The reason for doing this is because last time I did a media project, my model decided last minute that she did not want to be my model anymore. Due to this, I did not want to make the same risk again and so, I asked a student for my class to model for my during the lesson as I wasn’t ensure to get the photos I needed. I got a range of photos so that I had a choice of which photo I wanted to take, as well as taking the photos at different camera lengths and angles. I chose an outfit for my model to wear, targeted pacifically at my target audience. I decided for my model to wear a Lyle & Scott red jumper, a famous brand known by teenagers. The reason I decided for my model to wear this is because it is a very popular and well known brand with my target audience and so it gives off the message I intended to be given off to my audience. This message was, in the most simplest of words, that politics can be ‘cool’. Lyle & Scott is a ‘cool’ and popular brand and so I wanted my model to wear this as it gives of the message to teenagers with a stereotypical mind that you don’t have to be a ‘geek’ to enjoy and have interest in politics and what is happening around us in the world, but can be seen as ‘cool’ I think the Lyle & Scott jumper subtly shows this to my target audience.
My content page, I decided I wanted to keep very simple. I used a photo of the same model that I used on the front cover in which to keep a linking theme through out my magazine. I only did a very rough copy of my content page as I did not want to narrow down my ideas before having chance to think through them properly. I decided on a main image and decided to have the name of the magazine on the top of the content page as I think this would be a nice theme to have throughout the magazine, reminding the students constantly on what they are reading. When developing my content page, I would add a website on the bottom as well as obviously more content. The reason I did not add much content to my content page was because again, I didn’t want to have to narrow my ideas down as this was only a draft and I wanted to be able to think long and hard about what I would include in my content page.
If I were to do this again, I would spend a lot more time on my content page. Even though it was only a draft, I would have like to have included more information about my magazine and what is in my magazine. Also, the next time I do a media assignment I will ask if there is any other way in which to present my work as blogger has failed me to many times. It crashes constantly, refreshes the page on its own, in which making me loose all my work and has made me fail to put my evaluation on blogger on time. Also, due to the fact I only have a a certain access to the internet, it makes it very hard for my to do a lot of work on the internet.
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