Looking back at the preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt from

the progression of it to the full product?

What stages did you go through in making your music magazine?

● Research: Audience, market

● Planning: Pitch, flat plans, style sheet, photography plans, draft layouts

● Production: Image manipulation, text manipulation, layout manipulation, photography

What skills have you learnt?

There are four main skills that I have acquired whilst completing my project:

● Planning● Research● Aesthetics● Technical

Planningo I have learnt that planning is key to having a successful final product. It

is essential because it allows you to organise your time and to structure the details of the magazine.

o My music magazine has been a complex project needing many different tasks and skills, putting the magazine together has taught me some valuable project management skills. I have had to learn to plan every stage of the project from concept right through to completion.

o For the college magazine, I did not complete any planning at all, therefore when I started to create the magazine I felt as though I had no direction; I was not really sure what to include or what I was aiming for.

o So my skills have developed from the preliminary task as I undertook lots of planning; when I began to create the product I knew exactly how I wanted it to look.

o I have learnt that photography plans save a lot of time when it comes to taking photos on the day: you do not need to worry about what shots to take and which angles to use because you have already decided. This also leaves you more time to be creative, and experiment with shots or angles that you had not originally thought of on location.

o A pitch was very useful to complete because it allowed me to collate all the findings from my research and really think about the target audience and the type of magazine that I wanted to make. It also gave me a clear direction when starting to produce the final product as I knew a lot of the details, like: price, publication and target audience.

Researcho I have learnt throughout this process that research is vital if

you want to create a saleable magazine. There were a number of ways in which I identified my target audience, including: surveys, interviews and searching for reader profiles.

o For the preliminary task, I already knew that the target audience consisted of college students, i.e. young people ranging from 16-19, but I did no research to study competitor magazines, find out about institutions or ask what the target audience wanted to read about. This shows that I have progressed a lot from the preliminary task, as I conducted: an audience survey, reader profile research, an interview and publisher research.

o The publisher research enabled me to learn what other companies were doing and about their portfolio of products. For example I learnt that although Bauer appeal to a mass market and they reach over 19 million adults in the UK a week, they also specialise in niche markets such as angling and sports magazines. I looked at similar magazines and potential competitors, such as NME and Kerrang!. These helped me to study the codes and conventions of music magazines so that I knew what to add to mine to make it appeal. Their reader profiles also helped me to define my own target audience In terms of age, gender and class; this helped me to ensure that my magazine appealed to the target audience.

Aestheticso Aesthetics basically describes how things look, so relating to my magazine I

have learnt how to style: photographs, writing and layout, as well as to manipulate images. I used Adobe Photoshop to create each of my pages, because this is the best software available for manipulating images and layouts.

o I decided to use Photoshop for the preliminary task because I wanted to get more practice at using the software before starting the real project. However it is obvious from the appearance that my final product is much more professional looking then the college magazine.

o On my college magazine, I attempted to edit the skin tone of the model, but instead of it looking professional it just looked over airbrushed. On my final product, I only used the patch tool and the spot healing tool, so there are no blemishes but her face appears a lot more natural. I also experimented with the colour balance and levels, to get a slightly grainy effect which I think makes the image stand out and look a lot more exciting then just a plain photo.

o I have learnt about the layout of music magazines, especially when it came to the contents page. My contents page on the preliminary task looked quite boring and did not stand out as appealing to teenagers. I did not have a staple colour, whereas I used the vibrant colour purple to appeal to the audience. The contents page in my final product looks like a contents page in a music magazine because I used the text and line tool to create a column of text down the side. I learnt about the image rotation tool, and made one of my images canted to appeal to teenagers’ rebellious nature.

Technical

o A range of new techniques were employed when creating the music magazine, it was essential to use the right kind of software for each job.

o I have progressed a lot from my preliminary task because I only used one type of software to compete my product (Photoshop). Whereas for my final product I used a wide variety of different technologies, including: Survey Monkey, Microsoft Power Point and Slideshare.

o The survey that I conducted on Survey Monkey was a really useful way of finding out what my audience wanted to see in a music magazine. I asked questions such as ‘how much would you be prepared to pay for a music magazine?’, and ’why do you buy music magazines?’. Questions such as these helped me set a price for the magazine that I knew the majority or teenagers would be happy to pay, and also helped me decide on the content of the magazine. For example, I knew to include lots of posters as the results showed that this was a big influence of young people. Survey Monkey enabled me to put a link to my survey on Facebook and Twitter, so I appealed a large number of people and managed to get about 50 responses, so my data is more reliable as a large number of people were questioned. Finally, it saved me a lot of time because without this I would have had to either ask people individually or type out lots of surveys.

I also used a QR reader to engage with my target audience, because many of them will have smart phones who can use the code to access exclusive content. I learnt how to make a QR code online and if you scan the code, it links to my blog, as there is no website for my magazine.