Evaluation

My magazine is called ‘Hooked’ and it is a music magazine based on the pop genre. The target audience for my magazine is children/young teens. In this evaluation, I will attempt to explain in detail all the aspects involved in making the magazine front cover from how I made the magazine to my own personal opinions. In order to make ‘Hooked’ appear to look convincing as a real magazine, it was important to analyse existing magazine covers and find the common conventions that appeared in the majority of them. From this, as a class, we found that the certain elements were crucial in all major magazines were the main image, magazine title, variety of headlines, images, barcode, date and price. As these were the main conventions I made sure that all of them were applied to my magazine cover and used a layout that was also common in many of the magazines I looked at.

As my magazine genre is Pop, I found that the main audience of pop are young teens so a lot of the elements of my magazine front cover represent this certain social group. For example, the main image is of two young girls (Me and a friend.) I wanted young people on the front as this would relate to my target audience. In addition, I used effects on photoshop to give an almost airbrushed look on their faces as young teens often look up to celebrities who unfortunately always appear better looking on photo shoots due to editing. Self image is in my opinion something of a major issue amongst this younger age group.

The kind of media institution that might consider distributing my magazine front cover is IPC Media. This company has various brands and several genres. Some of the more known magazines include Marie Claire, Look, SuperBike, NME, Guitar and Bass. The reasons why I think that this institution will be a good one to use is due to them having many different magazines aimed at lots of different audiences. I did not come across many magazine aimed at a younger audience and therefore I think it would be a good idea to introduce the magazine to IPC Media as a way for them to expand their customers whilst promoting my magazine.
The target audience for my magazine is young teens aged 11 -16 who are generally interested in pop music and the latest pop-star gossip. It is aimed at both boys and girls so I had to make sure that when designing the front cover it would appeal to both genders and the range in ages. My main focus was the colours I used to attract my audience. I wanted the colours to be bright and stand out amongst other magazines. I used a variety of bright and colourful fonts to make the story headlines stand out and as well as this, I used shapes behind the text to add a fun effect. The main image is of the girl group ‘Dynamic Duo.’ Because I used a girl group in the main image, I felt that I would need headlines and images of male artists too so this would attract both sex readers as having a magazine based on one gender pop-stars may not interest all of target market. The headlines (such as ‘Who’s laughing now… find out which celebs were bullied at school’) were intended to have issues that young children can relate to and give them help and advice as some children turn to magazines for advice. Another way in which I my magazine appeals to my target audience was by giving away a free gift of a pop CD with every issue plus competitions to win “cool” prizes. Young children tend to like the idea of competitions and giveaways so this, was a key element that I wanted in the magazine. Finally, the price of £1.20 is a way that I tried to attract my audience as this is considered to be reasonable for a weekly magazine. This group decision was changed from the original price of £2 as we felt it was quite expensive for a weekly magazine and in additional to this we lowered the free CD from 10 songs to 5 songs as this would be more appropriate for ‘us’ to produce in terms of cost and time.Through making my magazine front cover I have learnt to using simply use the Mac which I as not originally as familiar with. My main improvement has been expanding my basic knowledge of photoshop and manipulating images on Adobe. I learnt to use new techniques on photoshop and have finally got my head around using layers properly. This computer software made my work look professional and I would feel confident using it again in the future.

If I had to make another front cover, I would do some things differently. One thing I would change would be the main image. When at some other people’s front covers I saw that a lot of medium shots were used for the main image. This meant that unlike my medium close-up, they were able to put more headlines and text around the image as they had more background space to work with. Another thing that I would do differently is plan more efficiently as when I came to producing my cover I made a lot of last minute decisions which is not a bad thing but could be less time consuming if I experimented first. Finally, I would consider changing my target audience as I would have liked to do a more sophisticated design as many music magazines that I know of are aimed at younger people; it would have been nice to do something different.

Overall, I personally feel that I have achieved an attractive front cover which would appeal to my target audience. I believe that it met it’s criteria in terms of forms and conventions of a magazine and I am also happy with my final outcome.