Question 7

EVALUATIONLOOKING BACK AT YOUR PRELI MI NARY TASK, WHAT DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE

LEARNT IN THE PROGRESSI ON FROM IT TO FULL PRODUCT?

Question 7

From creating my own music magazine I feel I have now got more of an understanding into how magazines are put together; it is not just pictures and words it is background research and creating a product what an audience wants to buy.

I feel as though I have learnt a verity of different skills from market research to putting the magazine together on In Design. Before I had begun this piece of coursework I did not know how to use InDesign and I only had a basic knowledge of some of the tools in Photoshop, like the magic wand tool, for this coursework I have had to develop these existing skills and learn completely new ones to give my magazine and overall professional look which has been very interesting.

I used the preliminary task as a ‘practice’ of how to make a magazine, I still wanted this to look professional but it helped to develop my skills. I did market research for the college magazine and found that a questionnaire was the most simple and effective way to collect data so I repeated this in the main music magazine task. If I was to do this task again I feel that I should have more practise on my InDesign skills as sometimes I struggled to get the look I wanted with my text and backgrounds.

I have learnt that audience is one of the most important aspects to making a magazine as if there is no audience there is no magazine. I had to do a lot of market research including questionnaires, class surveys and internet research to find get a target audience and what that particular audience would like to see in a magazine. I think if I was to do this task again I would have planned my questionnaires a little better and include more relevant questions that help me get a deeper understanding in to what my target audience does and what they like in a magazine.

I learnt about the forms and conventions of magazines (in particular music magazines) this included looking at a lot of magazines and seeing what similar conventions they had. I learnt that it is often good to break the conventions to keep up with the times and keep the audience on their toes but not to break them to much that the audience will not want to buy the magazine. For example the masthead on my magazine is quite unconventional as it has a picture within the text and isn’t just one bold colour. To improve this next time, if I was to repeat the task, I would think more about how my magazine could be more conventional so that it is recognisable as a music magazine.

I tried out a lot of different design styles to make sure that the magazine looked the best it could be. I found that taking lots of different popular music magazines and taking ideas from each of them helped me develop my own design style.

Overall I am very pleased with how my magazine has turned out as I feel it has a strong brand and I think it is something I would buy if I was in the shops. In hindsight I would change some of the aspects of my magazine, mainly photography as I feel as though I didn’t have a wide enough range to make the magazine look more professional. If I was to do this task again I would arrange to have more models and take some of the photos in different locations. It would also be good to get some photos from live gigs as this would give a strong musical feel. I think over the course of this making this magazine I have learnt at lot about conventions, representations, audience, design style, and technologies; doing the college magazine for the preliminary task really helped me develop these skills and helped me come out with an overall better music magazine.