THE EVALUATION!!!!!!!^_^!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My magazine is called ‘Hooked’ and I have finally finished it. I used Photoshop on a Mac computer to make the magazine cover. It is a music magazine and the genre that my group had chosen was Pop.

Even though there are many magazines that aim at the youth, we chose to use pop and alternative music too, so it differs to the other cheesy pop magazines that you normally get. That’s why on my magazine front cover I talked about ‘Gym class heroes’ which are a good example of pop/alternative. I want our magazine to appeal to a much wider audience. To come of with the idea of typography and colours, which go together, we as a group looked at various magazine from movie magazines to gossip and music mags. Me personally, I wanted colours that contradict each other rather then clashing and making the appearance look unprofessional and childish. The colours I chose were purple, white and grey. In addition, I only used two types of typography, reason being is that I wanted it to look classy yet casual with the colour purple. The language I used was straightforward yet convincing. The sentences were short and snappy. From doing some independent research on the web and in shops I thought that the youth like short catchy slogans such as Nike have ‘just do it’ and Mc Donald’s have ‘Im lovin it’. I thought to use something similar but original so I thought to use our website as one, ‘Hooked on pop’. I added this little feature so that it would look convincing like a real magazine but differ from most of them.

Our target audience is 11 – 16 so I thought to put someone that is a little older, maybe our audience could look up to her as a role model. The picture that I took was her looking up, to make it seem more effective and eye catchy because I took a look at some music mags and its always the picture of them looking straight at the camera or a shot of there whole body. My background is plain and simple, it’s white. I didn’t want to have tall buildings nor a colourful background, I chose white so the viewer would pay more attention to the photo and writing instead of the background, because that is what I really want to get the viewer to see.
I would like to target my magazines to young students at secondary and college. Reason being is because I think they are the people who listen to pop/alternative these days.

Now to get my target audiences attracted to my magazine cover I used language that they would understand and easily acknowledge. The sentences I used were simple not complex. The title and slogan was big and bold and purple, which was the theme colour of the cover. I used all of these features and other ones such as a pretty girl on my front cover to get the audience ‘Hooked’ in and to draw there attention.

The Mac computers that we used at our college were amazing and Photoshop just made things easier to do and made it look more professional. On Photoshop, you had a variety of techniques to use but I only added some of the Photoshop elements to my front cover. I have learnt that you could so just about everything to a picture and easily make a whole magazine with Photoshop, because it just makes things more simple to do with the ‘layers’ system. The one thing I didn’t like about the Mac computers were the speed of the mouse, it was very slow and they gave me a 22” screen to work on. However, I was new to Photoshop and Mac computers but after creating my cover, I have learnt how to use various techniques and effects of Photoshop.

If I was to make another front cover, I would spend more time on developing my planning and talking about my plans more thoroughly and in depth. Also, I would take different types of pictures, such as low angle shot or extreme close up shots, or shots from the feet looking up so the person looks more dominant. Depends on the type of magazine cover I’m doing and the topic.