Prelim Evaluation

As Bentley states, the creative process is; "The making of the new through the rearranging of the old." I used this in my product by looking at the common conventions of magazines, before I started to plan my own contents and cover page. I started by looking at the existing Bodmin College magazine, and concluded that it was not very good because it did not appeal to the target audience and followed very few of the common conventions of magazines. Because of this, I challenged the current conventions in the making of my magazine, and tried to resemble the magazine styles that my target audience said appealed to them in my SurveyMonkey. My target audience preferred the style of Empire magazine, so I followed some of the conventions displayed there, such as only having one central image, adding a strapline and the inclusion of a quote from the main headline in my contents page to represent their needs in my target audience. However, I did break some of the conventions because my magazine was from a different genre and I wanted to be original. One of the conventions I broke was the lack of a price tag, bar code and issue number.

My media product represents the social group of youth. According to Hall, youth are all troublemakers primarily concerned with having fun. My headline for my College magazine follows this, as it is about a student being named Rapper of the Year. Rap music is notorious for being aggressive and violent, concerned mainly with drugs, sex and alcohol. Therefore, a story about a student making rap music would follow Hall’s theory. However, the other two stories featured on the front cover disrupt Hall’s theory, as they show the students to be more hard-working, being about victories in sports and guidelines for students planning to go to university.

I managed to attract my audience by hosting a SurveyMonkey to discover what the audience thought was fitting for a College magazine. I published this survey to both Facebook and Twitter, to gather a wide range of responses from my target audience. The responses I received then had a major effect on the design of my final product.

I have learned more about how to use Photoshop and similar programs in this preliminary task, because I was not very good at using it before the task, and now I feel more competent at using it. I have also learned a lot more about how to effectively use Blogger and SurveyMonkey in this project.

I think that my analysis of the magazine front cover, and my suggestions of what could be improved went well. I intend to further improve my ability at using Photoshop before I complete my final product, because I feel that my work on Photoshop was not as good as the rest of my work. I also feel that I should improve my ability at taking photos, as many of the photos I planned to use came out worse than I intended.