Zaina's Media Magazine :)

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

My magazine was based on hip-hop music and I was aiming to create a magazine that was different yet similar to other magazines of the same music genre. There were many elements of hip-hop music magazines that I noticed whilst researching music magazines and these were incorporated into my magazine, but there were also elements I added that can be seen as challenging the structure and layout of a typical hip-hop magazine. Firstly, the placement of my masthead was influenced by Respect magazine where the masthead is placed at the top and takes up the whole width of the top part of the page. I used this style in my magazine because I feel it looks very strong and clear. Respect magazine also influenced the use and layout of text on my front cover for all the sub-articles. In Respect, the article titles are placed around the edge of the magazine so that the focus is on the image of the cover artist. I used this style in my magazine, with the cover articles around the edge in white font, being careful that the text doesn’t overlap onto the image of the artist. By doing this, I challenged the convention of Hip-Hop Weekly, because on the front cover of their magazine that I researched, text often overlapped onto the image of the main artist, however I feel that this makes the magazine cover look cramped. With regards to my contents page, I feel I heavily incorporated the styles of hip-hop magazines because hip-hop magazine contents pages are extremely different in the layout and structure of other music magazines. When carrying out my research, I realised that hip-hop magazine contents page are very vague and when first looking at the contents pages, it’s not clear that it’s a contents page because there is no title saying so. I didn’t like how they used this in both Hip-Hop Weekly and Respect, therefore I chose to have a title saying ‘Contents’. However I still wanted to have the unusual layout of hip-hop contents pages so I placed my contents page vertically down the left-hand side of the page. An element I did like about the hip-hop contents pages I researched was the layout of text. The text was chronologically ordered and structured in neat columns, with each page summary having a fair amount of text. I wanted to incorporate this into my magazine because I felt it worked really well so I laid out the text on my contents page in a chronological order and placed it in columns like Hip-Hop weekly. With my pictures, I decided to only use one picture because with Hip-Hop Weekly and Respect, only one or two images are used and there is more text than images so this idea has been included in my work.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My music magazine is for the hip-hop genre and this type of music is stereotypically listened to by young people. Therefore it is important that when I was making my magazine, I remembered my target audience and their interests. Colour is a very key element of a music magazine and although it often goes unnoticed, it is the main thing that catches a readers eye. For example, if the colour scheme of my magazine was bright, loud, pastel colours, that would typically attract a younger audience and be related to the pop genre. The colour scheme used in my magazine was predominantly black, red and white. I used these colours because when carrying out my magazine research, I noticed that hip-hop magazines mainly used dark, block colours so I used this in my magazine as well. The mise-en-scene of the pictures also would attract hip-hop listeners as they are wearing dark, hooded jumpers which is again associated with the hip-hop genre.

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

When it comes to distributing my magazine, it’s key to choose a publisher that has worked with media products that relate to the product you are making. Therefore I would choose IPC Media to distribute my music magazine because they have previously published Vibe Magazine, before the magazine ended. If the publishers have worked with similar types of products to yours, then it is clear they know how to accurately target and distribute the product.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

The audience for my magazine is very specific because they have to be interesting in what I am making. My target audience is predominantly males aged between 16-21, therefore it is important that I include elements that will keep this audience interested. I chose this audience as my target audience because my questionnaire results carried out for research showed that hardly anybody below the age of 16 would buy a hip-hop magazine and mainly males took an interest into buying a hip-hop magazine.

How did you attract/address your audience?

Carrying out a questionnaire was extremely useful because it helped me to know what to include in my magazine, what hip-hop listeners like to see, and how to grab their attention. The main element that would attract my target audience would be the use of colour. I chose the colour scheme of red, black and white because they are dark, plain, bold colours that easily catch a person’s attention and especially when those colours are associated to the hip-hop genre. Also the pictures I took were used to attract the audience because the mise-en-scene is very important because hip-hop listeners feel they can relate to the people on the cover in regards to what they are wearing etc. Also the use of text on the front cover, contents page and double-page spread is very important because it must be understood by the audience. If I were to use extremely formal language throughout my magazine it wouldn’t clearly relate to the genre of music, whereas if I were to use text that related more to the hip-hop genre, the readers would feel more comfortable reading it.

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

Many different technologies and software’s were used to help me create my magazine and also to carry out my research as well as display my research. www.blogger.com was the website used to display all my research carried out as well as to record my progress with my magazine. www.slideshare.net and www.surveymonkey.com have helped to upload my presentations and questionnaires in a clear, effective way. Both have helped me carry out my research and display it clearly, and therefore make key decisions with the making of my magazine. Photoshop was the main editing programme used to construct my magazine, and the process of making my magazine has vastly helped me to navigate my way around Photoshop and after this, I feel much more confident about Photoshop. When taking my pictures I used a SLR camera to take my pictures to ensure my pictures were of a high quality.

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

When constructing the magazine for the preliminary task, my knowledge of the editing software Photoshop was extremely limited, this therefore limited my ability to make a decent front cover. In comparison to my preliminary task, I feel my music magazine is better and I feel my Photoshop skills have come a long way. When looking at both covers, a noticeable difference is the quality of the photos used because with the preliminary task, a digital camera was used to take pictures and with the music magazine, a SLR camera was used which evidently shows higher quality. Another development made since the prelim task was the use of font. With my prelim task, I used very basic, ineffective font that created a childlike effect however I feel I have improved with fonts and now the fonts add to the impact of the magazine. With the contents page, I feel my preliminary contents page looks very rushed and unorganised, however with the music magazine contents page it looks more organised and ordered which is what I was trying to attempt because it related to magazines I had researched.

The Base: Evaluation on Prezi