Friday 9 May 2014
Thursday 1 May 2014
Monday 28 April 2014
Question 7. Looking back at my preliminary task, what do I feel I've learnt in the progression of it?
In the progression from researching and creating a school magazine, to doing the same for a music magazine I feel that I have learned a variety of skills and information.
Firstly in the planning for my school magazine, I learned how to identify a target audience. Initially I thought this was obvious, just people who are interested in the school however I learnt that target audience means you need to construct your magazine to suit certain genders, ages, religions, ethnic groups and so on. I learned to create a primary audience which I decided will be pupils that attend Plantsbrook School. I also learned to create a secondary audience, not people I want to directly target, but an audience I still want to target. I decided my secondary audience should be parents and teachers meaning they will be male and female, and probably 25 and over, for both my primary and secondary audience I considered the location which I decided would be Sutton Coldfield, and it's surrounding areas (Boldmere, Erdington and Wylde Green).
Deciding on this target audience, I began to think of designing my magazine, I created these mastheads in Fireworks:
Designing these taught me that I need to create an effective and bold masthead, which will stand out on the page. I also learned through this design that short mastheads are usually more effective.
Another thing I learned in the design stage of the magazine is how to take effective images. When taking photographs around the school (in this photoshoot), I learned that there shouldn't be too much room between the models head and the top of the image. Taking these images taught me about different camera shots, different lengths and how to position the artist using angles.
Through the production of my contents page I learned that it is important to develop a house style throughout a magazine. That is why I included the same banner with the school logo on both the front cover and contents page, and used similar fonts. This helped me understand what a brand identity is, the way in which a magazine presents itself to it's readers. I began to identify brand identities for other magazines. In my music magazine, I used the same blue orange and white colour scheme on the front cover and contents page, and just blue and white on the double page spread, using the same masthead. I thought a lot about the design, using a colour wheel. I used a moodboard to help develop my brand identity, and get a clearer indication of my target audience.
Moving on to my music magazine, I learned that I needed to represent the artists I featured, in either a positive or negative way using connotations. Two definitions I learned were: denotation - what is actually on a page (e.g. an image of a young female artist) and connotation - what the audience can deduce from the media text (e.g. the artist is smiling so they release upbeat music, they're wearing a Pink Floyd shirt so they may be influenced by Pink Floyd). I learned that through the positioning of the artists, their outfits, the lighting, the location and through the text about them I could represent the artist to my audience in the light that I want them to be seen in.
I learned that when designing a magazine I need to fit my audiences needs which is why I handed out a questionnaire to help me create the magazine which would be most suitable.
In the construction for my double page spread I researched into examples from other magazines. This is were I began to learn about the page furniture of a double page spread (what elements actually go into it).
Firstly in the planning for my school magazine, I learned how to identify a target audience. Initially I thought this was obvious, just people who are interested in the school however I learnt that target audience means you need to construct your magazine to suit certain genders, ages, religions, ethnic groups and so on. I learned to create a primary audience which I decided will be pupils that attend Plantsbrook School. I also learned to create a secondary audience, not people I want to directly target, but an audience I still want to target. I decided my secondary audience should be parents and teachers meaning they will be male and female, and probably 25 and over, for both my primary and secondary audience I considered the location which I decided would be Sutton Coldfield, and it's surrounding areas (Boldmere, Erdington and Wylde Green).
Deciding on this target audience, I began to think of designing my magazine, I created these mastheads in Fireworks:
Another thing I learned in the design stage of the magazine is how to take effective images. When taking photographs around the school (in this photoshoot), I learned that there shouldn't be too much room between the models head and the top of the image. Taking these images taught me about different camera shots, different lengths and how to position the artist using angles.
I then learned about what the other conventions of magazines actually are, including:
- Masthead - The name/ logo of a magazine which is bold to introduce and attract a reader to the magazine.
- Headlines - large titles which are the main articles in the magazine.
- Coverlines - Text which indicates the content of the magazine, which is smaller than a headline.
- Pull quotes - quotes that have been taken from the magazine's articles.
- Features/ articles - the news and information which is actually included in the magazine.
- Lure - pull quotes printed to make the audience want to read more.
- Serif style font - A font which includes hooks, brackets and feet.
- Sans-serif style font - a font that does not include hooks, brackets and feet.
- Pug/ starburst - a shape with text to attract the audience to the magazine.
- Layout - the structure of the magazine front cover.
- House Style - the theme, colours and text that links all of the magazine together.
- Mode of Address - the formality and way the magazine speaks to it's audience.
- Visual Syntax - the way in which the readers eye is drawn throughout.
- Straplines - headlines in smaller font appearing below a major headline.
- Hook - method of luring through the design.
- Banner – a coloured banner with text on it.
- Photos – the images used and how they are placed e.g. being superimposed.
- Masking – cutting around a photon to superimpose it on to a background.
- Gutter – space between columns on the page.
- Stand first – introductory paragraph before the main article.
- Stroke - line put around text or an article to make it stand out.
- Use of colour – how colour is used on the page.
- Drop-shadow – shadowing around a text to make it stand out.
- Cropping – cutting off parts of an image to emphasise a particular aspect.
As you can see from this front cover, I learned how to actually create a pug (which I placed in the bottom right corner), and a banner on the bottom of the page. Although overall I feel that my final school magazine front cover is ineffective. Making a front cover that I wasn't happy with led me to learn more about design. I learnt having a multitude of fonts in different sizes and colours is good to an extent, but I felt that I overdid it. Also on the headline 'Miss Cambell speaks!' the colour is too faint, which taught me that my headline needs to be bolder, and all of the text needs to stand out on the front cover.
Designing this front cover I learned how to lure an audience through the use of pull quotes, in the quote "I felt like quitting..." I have used an ellipse, making the audience want to read on. The use of a pug would also lure my audience into reading on, as 'Best ever GCSE results!' would be interesting to both my primary audience of pupils and secondary audience of teacher and parents.
Through the production of my contents page I learned that it is important to develop a house style throughout a magazine. That is why I included the same banner with the school logo on both the front cover and contents page, and used similar fonts. This helped me understand what a brand identity is, the way in which a magazine presents itself to it's readers. I began to identify brand identities for other magazines. In my music magazine, I used the same blue orange and white colour scheme on the front cover and contents page, and just blue and white on the double page spread, using the same masthead. I thought a lot about the design, using a colour wheel. I used a moodboard to help develop my brand identity, and get a clearer indication of my target audience.
Moving on to my music magazine, I learned that I needed to represent the artists I featured, in either a positive or negative way using connotations. Two definitions I learned were: denotation - what is actually on a page (e.g. an image of a young female artist) and connotation - what the audience can deduce from the media text (e.g. the artist is smiling so they release upbeat music, they're wearing a Pink Floyd shirt so they may be influenced by Pink Floyd). I learned that through the positioning of the artists, their outfits, the lighting, the location and through the text about them I could represent the artist to my audience in the light that I want them to be seen in.
I learned that when designing a magazine I need to fit my audiences needs which is why I handed out a questionnaire to help me create the magazine which would be most suitable.
In the construction for my double page spread I researched into examples from other magazines. This is were I began to learn about the page furniture of a double page spread (what elements actually go into it).
Tuesday 22 April 2014
Question 6. What have I learnt about technologies in process of constructing my product?
During the creating of these media products, there have been many technologies I have used to help research into, design, create and adapt my media texts. They have highly benefited me when I was designing both the school magazine front cover and contents page, and also the music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread.
Firstly, software that helped present the research into my music magazine was 'Microsoft Excel'. During the planning stages of my music magazine, I spoke to many individuals to ask them who they were, and what their desires would be if they were to buy a music magazine, I decided to present this data in the form of charts to make the evidence more clear to myself when creating my product, here are the results:
http://jameswaleasmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/questionnaire-results-in-chart-form.html
Using this new technology I learned how to present data in a clear and interesting way, this technology also taught me how to physically create these graphs, through entering the data in Excel and picking the graph to use, what colour the different sections will be and many other different factors.
One of the main components of a magazine is the images that are featured. To help aid my design as much as possible I took a large quantity of photographs, meaning a large storage space was needed, this is where I learned how to use image hosting websites, more specifically 'Flickr'. My Flickr account allowed for ease of access to all of the photographs I had taken and gave me a large amount of space to keep them all. This taught me that image hosting websites can be used as an alternative to keeping all images on a hard drive, and that using these websites is a lot easier as you can merely copy and paste from them.
Fireworks is editing software, and it's the program I used to actually design my media products, which has many features to help edit, crop, recolour and reposition my images, add and change the size and colour of text, and it has many more features which were extremely useful. Firstly, I learned how to re-size an image without affecting it's proportions, by holding down shift when dragging the corner to re-size it. Although to make the images I took in preparation more suitable I had to edit them.
One of the main things I learnt about technology through constructing my media product, was the use of digital photo editing to make images more suitable and visually appealing for my magazine. For this I used the photo editing website 'Picmonkey'. The first way I experimented with photo editing, was adjusting the different levels of colour on my image, making it more vibrant and colourful which I thought looked a lot more appropriate for an exciting, fresh and new music magazine.
When designing my magazine on 'Fireworks' I found the range of fonts to be rather limited, in my opinion they all certainly weren't striking enough to use for a masthead or the headline on a professional magazine. This made me explore further into the options technologies gave me in producing a product, I found different websites featuring a variety of fonts including '1001fonts.com' however I decided the best product to use would be 'dafont.com' Here is the first masthead which I produced, by combining a font I found on the website, with a recolouring and drop-shadow from Fireworks.
Although I liked this font, I didn't feel it suited my magazine very well, therefore I had a further look through 'Dafont'. This time I found a font which I found extremely suitable as a striking masthead, therefore I used it throughout the rest of my magazine:
Although the font websites were extremely useful when designing my magazine and I could enter my own text, I had to copy, paste and crop the text into Fireworks to complete it. Pasting it into Fireworks meant that I could use the 'magic wand' tool to remove the white background, and also using the fill tool I could change the colour of the font to fit the page and my house style more. This taught me that using the technology of font websites, I can expand the amount of fonts on my computer and editing programme such as Fireworks, however what I can do with these fonts is quite limited until I actually paste the text into the software.
The use of Fireworks was vast within the production of my products, when designing my front cover I decided that I wanted to have a plain white background to make the image stand out.
I also leaned how to create transparency on banners, by clicking on the different colours and reducing the percentage of opacity.
To do this, I dragged the positioning of the image to the bottom on the right hand side of the page, and then clicked 'commands', 'creative' and then 'convert to grey-scale' to make the blue text stand out more on the page.
To present the progress of my work I used 'Blogger' a blogging website which allowed me to upload both my actual products and also my analysis. This helped me learn how to upload both text and images on to my blog, and also how to use a HTML code to embed files from several of the other programmes I was using. Using Blogger has also taught me how to create and edit posts on my dashboard:
This taught me how to created drafts and how to preview and save them, which was extremely helpful in my analysis.
Another technology I became familiar with during the construction of my product was the presentation creating website 'Prezi' which I used to present my analysis of an existing media product: http://prezi.com/hym4rv5idzan/analysis-of-a-music-magazine/
This allowed me to present a lot of information in an interesting appealing way. The technology helped me break down each section of the music magazine making it easier to analyse. I learned how to create a presentation on a programme other than Microsoft power-point.
Therefore using 'Prezi' also helped me learn how to use HTML codes, which was extremely useful on my blog. I used Prezi once again to present my analysis of how I presented social groups within my media text.
To further analyse my media product, and different areas surrounding it I learnt about many more programmes. One of the programmes I learnt how to use was the website 'Padlet' which allowed me to show how I used, challenged or conformed to the conventions of a magazine through the creation of my media product. The website allowed me to upload all of my products, placing them next to existing ones along with information and was very simple to use, through my analysis I learned how to construct a 'wall' of information, with uploading both images and text. Here is my Padlet.
Firstly, software that helped present the research into my music magazine was 'Microsoft Excel'. During the planning stages of my music magazine, I spoke to many individuals to ask them who they were, and what their desires would be if they were to buy a music magazine, I decided to present this data in the form of charts to make the evidence more clear to myself when creating my product, here are the results:
http://jameswaleasmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/questionnaire-results-in-chart-form.html
Using this new technology I learned how to present data in a clear and interesting way, this technology also taught me how to physically create these graphs, through entering the data in Excel and picking the graph to use, what colour the different sections will be and many other different factors.
One of the main components of a magazine is the images that are featured. To help aid my design as much as possible I took a large quantity of photographs, meaning a large storage space was needed, this is where I learned how to use image hosting websites, more specifically 'Flickr'. My Flickr account allowed for ease of access to all of the photographs I had taken and gave me a large amount of space to keep them all. This taught me that image hosting websites can be used as an alternative to keeping all images on a hard drive, and that using these websites is a lot easier as you can merely copy and paste from them.
Fireworks is editing software, and it's the program I used to actually design my media products, which has many features to help edit, crop, recolour and reposition my images, add and change the size and colour of text, and it has many more features which were extremely useful. Firstly, I learned how to re-size an image without affecting it's proportions, by holding down shift when dragging the corner to re-size it. Although to make the images I took in preparation more suitable I had to edit them.
One of the main things I learnt about technology through constructing my media product, was the use of digital photo editing to make images more suitable and visually appealing for my magazine. For this I used the photo editing website 'Picmonkey'. The first way I experimented with photo editing, was adjusting the different levels of colour on my image, making it more vibrant and colourful which I thought looked a lot more appropriate for an exciting, fresh and new music magazine.
The increased contrast and also brightness makes the image much warmer and colourful, which I feel has made the image visually striking. This taught me that using technologies could make an image vibrant, and in doing so the technologies actually make the image more striking, which is important as there is much competition within the alternative music magazine genre. Here is the image with increased brightness and contrast:
Although I did experiment with this image on 'picmonkey' further by attempting an increase in sharpness I felt that this was not visually effective and didn't make the image stand out as much, which taught me that new technologies can be good in photo editing as long as the effects aren't overdone and actually fit the image well, using several different effects can make the image look very strange and unappealing to my audience.
When designing my magazine on 'Fireworks' I found the range of fonts to be rather limited, in my opinion they all certainly weren't striking enough to use for a masthead or the headline on a professional magazine. This made me explore further into the options technologies gave me in producing a product, I found different websites featuring a variety of fonts including '1001fonts.com' however I decided the best product to use would be 'dafont.com' Here is the first masthead which I produced, by combining a font I found on the website, with a recolouring and drop-shadow from Fireworks.
Although the font websites were extremely useful when designing my magazine and I could enter my own text, I had to copy, paste and crop the text into Fireworks to complete it. Pasting it into Fireworks meant that I could use the 'magic wand' tool to remove the white background, and also using the fill tool I could change the colour of the font to fit the page and my house style more. This taught me that using the technology of font websites, I can expand the amount of fonts on my computer and editing programme such as Fireworks, however what I can do with these fonts is quite limited until I actually paste the text into the software.
The use of Fireworks was vast within the production of my products, when designing my front cover I decided that I wanted to have a plain white background to make the image stand out.
Fireworks allowed me to do this through it's 'magic wand' tool, I clicked the tool and increased the tolerance to help all of the cream background be deleted, then I clicked on the background and pressed delete. Fireworks has many features that allowed me to make different text and images stand out, including a 'drop shadow' which I used on the headline on the front cover.
I also leaned how to create transparency on banners, by clicking on the different colours and reducing the percentage of opacity.
This helped me make the text stand out on my extremely colourful image, as it was difficult to make the text readable, another skill that I learned during my use of Fireworks was how to turn an image into the background for a page (like in my double page spread).
To present the progress of my work I used 'Blogger' a blogging website which allowed me to upload both my actual products and also my analysis. This helped me learn how to upload both text and images on to my blog, and also how to use a HTML code to embed files from several of the other programmes I was using. Using Blogger has also taught me how to create and edit posts on my dashboard:
This taught me how to created drafts and how to preview and save them, which was extremely helpful in my analysis.
Another technology I became familiar with during the construction of my product was the presentation creating website 'Prezi' which I used to present my analysis of an existing media product: http://prezi.com/hym4rv5idzan/analysis-of-a-music-magazine/
This allowed me to present a lot of information in an interesting appealing way. The technology helped me break down each section of the music magazine making it easier to analyse. I learned how to create a presentation on a programme other than Microsoft power-point.
To further analyse my media product, and different areas surrounding it I learnt about many more programmes. One of the programmes I learnt how to use was the website 'Padlet' which allowed me to show how I used, challenged or conformed to the conventions of a magazine through the creation of my media product. The website allowed me to upload all of my products, placing them next to existing ones along with information and was very simple to use, through my analysis I learned how to construct a 'wall' of information, with uploading both images and text. Here is my Padlet.
Tuesday 15 April 2014
Question 5 How did you attract/ address your target audience?
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/510462043950678017
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/520547551816974337
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/512682809509281792
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/520547551816974337 
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/512682809509281792
Monday 7 April 2014
Question 4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
My ideal reader would be quite young, possibly in the age group 15-25, this would mean a majority of them are students, at secondary school to college and also in University. The reason young people will be ideal for my magazine is that a lot of the bands I feature are young and up and coming, which will interest a young readership. As they are interested in alternative music, I believe that they will also be interested in alternative and vintage fashions, settling for several niche styles, such as rockers and indie's. To be into alternative fashions, my ideal reader will probably shop at alternative places such as Oasis market, but also vintage shops to get a more unique and obviously vintage fashion, therefore they will shop at places like 'COW' and other vintage shops. Here are some examples of alternative fashions:
As I said before my ideal reader will enjoy new and alternative music, and their belief will be that it is good to follow and take an active interest in bands of their generation. Even though they will be interested in new bands, as with the alternative fashions my ideal reader would also be interested in some older more 'classic' music (for example; Pink Floyd, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Joy Division). This will give them a range of ways in which to consume the music they enjoy, they will probably find newer bands through streaming services such as Soundcloud and Spotify (as this is where many younger bands release their early singles and EP's) however they may listen to music bought from either itunes or even on vinyl as records have become a lot more prominent in the past few years, in alternative shops such as Urban Outfitters. They are also likely to experience a lot of live music, either at concerts or at festivals, however my ideal reader is likely to attend both small (Lunar Festival, Parklife) and larger ones (Reading and Leeds, Glastonbury). My ideal reader will attend these festivals with friends who have similar interests to them.
Being quite young, they are likely to own quite modern phones such as HTC's and iPhone's, giving them access to music services such as Spotify. Also people in that age bracket are more likely to go out with friends, and having a good phone may be seen as a good way to present themselves when going out. They will spend much of their free time either doing homework and coursework (if they are attending University, School or College) but also going out to clubs with friends, as well as spending some time listening to music. My ideal reader will have a large use of technology, possibly having a Facebook, Twitter and Youtube account.
Being quite young, they are likely to own quite modern phones such as HTC's and iPhone's, giving them access to music services such as Spotify. Also people in that age bracket are more likely to go out with friends, and having a good phone may be seen as a good way to present themselves when going out. They will spend much of their free time either doing homework and coursework (if they are attending University, School or College) but also going out to clubs with friends, as well as spending some time listening to music. My ideal reader will have a large use of technology, possibly having a Facebook, Twitter and Youtube account.
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