Evaluation

Evaluation

While making my school magazine I carried out some research to establish what type of magazine that I wanted to create. Firstly I looked at the existing school magazines. However when it came to researching school magazine it appeared that there was not many magazine available on the Internet or that most schools did not have a magazine.

One reason that schools might not have school magazine is that it takes time to structure, organise and create a magazine. When I did come across some school magazine they were mainly only whole school magazines rather than just sixth form magazines or college magazines. I decided to challenge this convention by creating a magazine for the sixth form.

My sixth form magazine challenges the conventions of a normal school or college magazine. This is because most of the school magazines that I saw were written by teachers and read by students. My magazine was written by students to be read by students. The structure and layout of all the magazines that I have looked at is all educational whereas my magazine challenges this because half of my magazine was educational and the other half to be general information (e.g. Fashion). I decided to do this because it is what my target audience supported this idea and because it is unique compared to other schools.

The ideas for inside my magazine came from my questionnaire which I asked my target audience, Students aged between 16-18. I decided to carry out a questionnaire because it was a simple way of finding out the needs of my target audience. The idea of the questionnaire was successful because I found out all my results that I needed to make the magazine. Results from the questionnaire showed that the audience wanted to read about fashion, gigs and many other interesting subjects. I then targeted my target audience, I put questions to my focus group because then I can ask more elaborate questions. If I was to do this research again I would possibly use a large number of people for my focus group to get a variety of answers.

When creating my magazine I considered many flatplans so that I knew all the possible layouts. I came up with the name of the magazine through asking my focus group and using the questionnaire. Having made my decisions i moved on to take my photographs. When I took photographs for my magazine it took many attempts to decide what photo suits the style of the magazine. Whilst taking the photos I came across some problems, for example there were some sun spots which could not be edited. Also when I gathered people to take my group photo there was a problem because not many people would agree to be part of the image. However i felt that a group photo was beneficial because it gives a friendly view. When I took the pictures for the magazine I wanted to show the sixth was very ethnic, therefore I included people from all different races and religions. This can be seen on the contents page.

The imaged used on the front cover was of an average student named Laura. The background of the main image is of a brick wall. This represents the strong community of the school. The body language labelled on the front cover is meant to show Laura as shocked and amazed. However when I showed this to my focus group they agreed that her faced showed the stereotypical teenage way to act shocked but if an adult was to see this they would think Laura was laughing. Therefore the message coming across to my target audience is very confused. However if i had more time to create the magazine I would construct another photo to make sure Laura's reaction was clear. I therefore decided to take another image and change the face expression to be more bold.

I then brought all the ideas together to create the front cover of the magazine. The image for the background was an average student acting out against a brick wall. I used this image because it was like no other magazine. The font that I trailed out first was Black because it stands out against the orange brick background. The audience were able to read the sub heading. Also the way in which the subheadings were laid out on the page were limited and there was very few. 

However I showed the first draft of the image to my focus group they agreed that the font and colour appeared very boring and not very appealing for a student magazine. Also they felt that there was only a few subheadings and there was not enough information about what is inside the magazine. Therefore I solved these problems by adding more subheadings about the issue and also I changed the colour of the font to yellow. This seemed bright and appealing to the target audience. Yellow can be seem as a happy cheerful colour. This could be compared to the use of yellow in the SEEC Dave magazine which I analysed in my magazine research.

I created my magazine on Mac computers in school and at home on CS3 Photoshop. Mainly all media products are made on Photoshop now. However for me this caused problems because I had never used Photoshop before, so it took me a long period to gather the many different concepts and features of Photoshop. However as this is only the preliminary task I can now learn and develop my knowledge of Photoshop to create a better magazine for the main task.

The magazine will be sold within the school, as i feel this will be the best way to sell the magazine. The school magazine will be made and produced by the school. However money will need to be provided to fund the magazine, the money will be raised by sponsorship from outside the school and also from inside school. Companies that aim at students from outside school are likely to sponsor because it’s an easy way of advertising straight to them. The magazine will be given out to sixth form students for free because this guarantees that each student will read the magazine.

Overall my school magazine represents the interests of an average 16-18 sixth former. The magazine focuses on both the life of the school and general girl information, in a way that students would find interesting. This means that the students will read the magazine instead of their parents because the articles relates to the student. I have learnt a lot from this preliminary task, even though I could change a few details. I can now develop these ideas from the main task, the music magazine.