Evaluation of the Preliminary Exercise

In what ways does the media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of a school magazine?

My Magazine uses forms and conventions of a school magazine in a number of ways. It does this by using a simple and traditional magazine layout, and not over complicating things. This is good as it will be more appealing to the audience and will have a resemblance to magazines they are used to reading.

My magazine develops the conventions of a school magazine by using patterns in the background to make the colour scheme appear more appealing and attractive to the young readers. I have also boxed off my text at angles to take away the formal approach of a magazine so that teenagers are not put off the magazine. I have also placed the background to my masthead on an angle, which develops the basic conventions of a school magazine, and allows my magazine to stand out.

How effective is the front page of your magazine in focusing on the ethos of the school?

I think that my magazine is effective on focusing on the ethos of the school, as it follows the sixth form colour scheme for the uniform, as is reflected in the photo on my cover. This links my magazine to the school, and will allow the students to relate to it and feel comfortable reading it. On my contents page, I have also used a photograph of a student’s grade sheet for their final GCSE’s. This will again allow the students to relate to the magazine and feel that at least one of the articles is relevant to them.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

From my audience feedback I have learnt that I have too much dead space around my fonts and titles, which means that I will need to find more things to put on my actual magazine cover, or that I will need to arrange them better. My masthead has also received a lot of criticism and as I have put it at a slight angle, and have not faded the masthead into the background. This gives makes the masthead look less professional, and is something I will try to avoid in my final product.

The photo that I have used for my main image also clashes with the background colour, and so does not stand out enough. In addition to this, it makes my cover appear to have more dead space, and is not as eye catching as it could be.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the research planning and construction of my school magazine cover and contents page, I have user a number of media technologies and applications. For my research I mainly relied upon Google images to supply me with examples of contents pages and covers. I then used blogger to add, annotate and evaluate them. I also used my iPad to take photos of some double page spreads for me to annotate, and again did this on blogger. One other programme I used was macro media fireworks which allowed me to design and construct my cover and contents page, as well as editing the photos I needed. The final thing that I have used was a website called DaFont which allows me to install a selection of fonts to my computer, which I can then use on my preliminary tasks, allowing me to make them unique and finding something which suited the style that I wanted on my cover.