Evaluation draft answers

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions for real media products?There are many ways in which you can follow a real media product and if you do it makes the task a lot easier if you do so. There are many things that stand out in a magazine for example to title, if you make the title stand out it is going to make people buy the magazine, maybe just because the front cover looks good, this is especially with the younger generations how they pick things up because they are pretty or because they stand out and they are interested. My name IT was named that because it was easy to remember and it was short and simple. I also thought it was a good way of saying that the magazine was ‘it’ it had all the in stuff and it was the magazine that people wanted to buy. I didn’t chose to have a skyline as I didn’t want to make the magazine look too busy and there was simply not room for it as my photo took up all the room from top to bottom. As my name for my magazine is short and simple I didn’t want it in the middle of the page at the top because it was short I thought it was better to put in the corner of the magazine, other magazines do this such as Q magazine, because it is short it would not look right if it was in the middle of the page, it drags the attention of the reader in if it is at the corner or the page. I would also never move where the title is on the page if there was another issue that was brought out I think it should stay in the same place and people will know where to look if they are looking for the magazine. I think the information on the front of the magazine is vital, it is what grabs the read and pulls them in, if you have amazing story lines on the front cover you need to make sure that they are so interesting that people do not even think about it and just buy the magazine, if the magazine has interesting stories every month it means that people are going to buy it every month, purely for the story lines and the celebrities that are inside the story. It is harder creating a magazine that is music based and I think that is one thing that I struggled on when it came to making my magazine, I would of preferred to do a gossip magazine, however it was good to add a musical twist on my magazine. My idea for my magazine was to create a magazine that was about music and what had happened in the past month but also keep it quite art-y and make people buy it for the fact that it was pretty and that it drew the audience in. There are other things that I have used things such as the issue number and the date of the issue, other things such as the barcode, every real magazine has a barcode, this was a good affect to give my magazine and make it look like a real media product. Another thing I made look like a real media product was the huge story line, the double page spread story was a lot bigger than the other stories, it caught the readers attention (I hope) and would hopefully make people pick up the magazine as the main story was on a celebrity. Another thing I added was the ‘free CD’ a lot of magazine put freebees in their magazine and it make the sales of the magazine go up as sometimes people just buy for the CD, however they may end up liking the magazine and buying it continuously, which is good for sales of the magazine. Another convention I have also used is putting the price on the magazine,

this is a vital part of the magazine, the price may or may not put people off buying it, but you need to make sure that the price of the magazine is a good price for what is included in the magazine and what you get with it.

There are many things I have developed on my media product for example, when I was looking for ideas for my magazine and looking at real media products I came across blend magazine, I like the idea of their magazine, it was a fashion magazine but I liked their take on it, the fact that it was about fashion but it was very art-y and had a artist twist to it but inside the magazine it was full of skinny models. I took this idea and expanded on it, I liked the idea of it and the layout, my first idea was going to be that I copied off this idea to a T but I suddenly changed my mind when it came to actually putting my magazine together and I realised it didn’t work for my genre of magazine, Blend magazine looked better because they were professional models and the company was famous for being an artist fashion magazine. I got rid of having a small picture and made it bigger making it cover the full of the front page, so it drew the audience in and made the titles stand out more, I didn’t want the photos that I had taken to be tiny and for people to have to squint to be able to see them so I made it 100% bigger and realised that it looked so much better, then developed even further and edited the photo and didn’t have a line around it like Blend magazine did. The only thing I ended up taking for Blend Magazine was the half a picture idea, Blend magazine change that image every issue and change the photo depending on the central image.