Evaluation of main task

After extensive research into a wide variety of different magazine genres ranging from dance magazines such as Rave to heavy metal related magazines such as Kerrang, also music magazines that cover everything that’s important, trend-setting, and newsworthy to young adults for example ‘Rolling Stones’. Once I had conducted my research I found no current evidence of a magazine which focuses solely on mainstream pop-music. This inspired me to design and create a new and upcoming magazine which does focus on the pop-culture side of the music industry along with an accompanying double page spread and contents page.


My music magazine ‘TNT’ uses many conventions that would be expected of a magazine, which I found after my in depth research. For the front cover these may consist of such things as: a masthead, a slogan, a main headline , sub headlines featuring other articles, a main image, possibly other images, plugs, a barcode, price and date. My front cover uses all these conventional aspects to their full potential. For example I have used images of music groups, the plug is offering i tunes vouchers and the smaller images are of famous bands that would appeal to my target audience. One thing I did notice about the conventional aspects of a variety of magazine mastheads is that part of it is often covered over to portray the recognisability of the product. However my music magazine challenges this convention in the sense that the entire masthead is clearly visible. The reason I chose to do this is because my music magazine is new and upcoming therefore people need to make themselves familiar with the magazine so they need to be able to see the masthead as well as possible, although this would be a convention I would consider for future issues of ‘TNT’. In comparison to a real life media product such as a double page spread, I have tried to make the double page in my magazine as a realistic as possible in the way that it intertwines the main image on one side with the main body text which dominates the other page by overlapping them slightly onto each others page to eliminate the sense of being two separate pages. I realised that the conventions which can be expected of a contents page are such things as; different content categories, which my magazine features to the right hand side consisting of five main categories which are especially related to music.


The particular issue of my music magazine which I have designed and created represents young adult females. As people who enjoy pop music are generally more females than men. However in future issues I would want my magazine to not focus entirely on one gender to create a fair and equal representation to appeal to both genders. But I would say that overall my magazine is aimed more at females as it uses very bright and stereotypically ‘girl’ colours such as yellows and purples. The girls which I have featured as the band on the front cover are very stereotypical of the celebrity appearance that inspires girls to desire to look like them, that is being tall, thin no imperfections etc. I opted to dress them in bright and eye catching colours which will draw in the female reader as they enjoy fashion and lookout for celebrities who they might aspire to be like. The particular way in which the girls are posed is meant to appear attractive, fun and not too seductive. I found that all the girls who featured on music magazine covers were all looked very seductive and showing a lot of flesh. My magazine challenges this idea as I find that girls who are made to look seductive or sexually attractive on front covers may intimidate females and discourage them from buying it. Therefore I made sure that my girls looked attractive but in a fun loving way to represent the female social group.


The main target audience intended for my music magazine are mainly young adult females although I am not ruling males out entirely, because it all depends the person’s love of pop music. I would say this particular issue of TNT is targeted at females due to the number of aspects such as the colours I used like yellows and purples which I maintained throughout my magazine, the shapes I included, for instance love hearts and moreover the gossip style content featured on the front for example ‘why the pop princesses are not all sugar and spice’, these features are stereotypically the representation of femininity, which will help to address my audience. I took a great deal of time when first designing my music magazine how I was to attract its target audience of young adults which more realistically according to the stereotype would attract more females than males. I therefore decided I would feature an all girl band which is also new on the scene but have already been a big hit with pop music lovers to persuade them to want to but it. If a person likes the act that features on the front they are more likely to purchase it. I used bright and bold colours that would not only draw in potential readers but used specific colours such as orange, yellow and purple which are stereotypically more attractive to females. I also chose these particular colours to represent the music genre itself as pop is generally very up-beat and catchy. The main picture on the front cover of my magazine are a girl band called ‘The Sweetest Thing’ the music they produce I would say is more appealing to the female population which is why I opted to have them as my main feature. To attract a female audience the magazine must maintain a positive outlook, I therefore decided to position my girl band in a ‘cheeky/attractive’ way, as opposed to a ‘seductive/attractive’ way as this could be seen as intimidating to some females and in addition to this some may feel offended that women are exposed in this light and discourage them from buying TNT.


If I was to suggest a media institution that would consider distributing and publishing my magazine ‘TNT’ I would say Emap. This institute is one of the many of the recognisable music magazines. For example they are the publishers of the kerrang magazine, the UK's premier multi-platform music destination and is the worlds biggest selling weekly rock magazine. Other music magazines within the Emap performance stable are; Sneak, Smash Hits, Mixmag, Q and Mojo. These cover a wide spectrum of tastes and age groups but all stand by a reputation of quality and passion which I would be more than happy for them to represent my music magazine,because it shows the credibility and success of the publisher. Considering that they cover a wide spectrum of tastes they do not have a magazine which focuses solely on the pop music genre aimed at young adult females, which means there is a gap within their target market. Therefore this would be the perfect publishing/distribution institute for my new music magazine to fit into and be represented by. Emap Performance also has a variety of websites supporting the music magazines and radio stations, which would be very good for the future of magazine when it has been out a while and has a large stable audience a website would be a great way for the readers of today’s modern society who enjoy surfing the net and therefore maybe would attract more readers and also give existing readers a chance to keep up to date with the latest pop music new and so forth.


From the process of constructing my media product I have learn a lot of new aspects of technology that I never knew before. It has given me the ability to use programs such as Microsoft Publisher and Photo-shop much more confidently. For example I now know all the elements of publisher wish overall allowed me to design my magazine much more creatively and effectively especially with the double page spread as it had specific layout guidelines etc which suited my design perfectly. Also the drop cap tool which enabled me to have the opportunity to make my double page spread much more realistic in relation to a real media product (however taking into account the style and layout of my spread I opted not to use this advantage). Also this production has introduced me to the many elements of Photo-Shop, which is a very creative and helpful image editor to make required changes to your pictures to show them off to there full potential. This includes background changes which I found particularly handy as the location where I took my shots was not suitable for the image I wanted. However this was not a problem as I wished to eliminate my background in exchange for a totally white background, to represent the simplicity of pop focused magazine and also to emphasise all the features on the front. All this technology has helped me in achieving an end product which uses all the conventions of a music magazine and in general has given me the knowledge and confidence to be able to use these sort of technologies in the future.


Looking back at the work from my preliminary task I have made considerable improvements in many different aspects. For example I can now identify conventions of magazines much easier now and this shows in the final media product of the main task in comparison to the preliminary one. As my first college magazine uses too many colours which I now know is not a common convention of real media products. I think my first production looks quite amateur, whereas my main task production looks a lot more realistic as I have made sure to cover all the basic conventions of magazines, which is just one of the things I have learnt since completing the first task. Also as I mentioned previously about the use of technology, when doing the preliminary task I was not very familiar with the different software and still experimenting with different program functions to see what is the best to meet the requirements. I think this gave me a good insight in to the technology available and this enabled me to complete my main task to a much better standard after more practice. I have also done a lot less of in-depth research in my first task which in the long run did not prepare me enough for when it came to designing the real thing. I learnt form this though and have done a lot of extensive research into the music magazine industry and have gained knowledge about many different media institutions. This allowed me to create my magazine much easier as I was prepared with the knowledge I gained from the research. When comparing the work of my first and second task it shows how much improvements I have made and I feel the preliminary task was very good and a necessary task to enable me to really prepare fully for the second task as I now knew what was expected and gained much knowledge which helped me dramatically when it came down to completing the main task.

I have included a poll vote for my magazine to obtain some valuable audience feed back. The majority vote has answered as what should be expected. However in one poll it is fifty-fifty, I don't mind this though because you could say that my magazine is a mixture of both the answers to question four. Therefore overall I am pleased with the results.

In conclusion I believe that my front cover, double page spread and contents page of a new pop music magazine has the potential to sell on the shelf and be a big success in the magazine industry as there is a big market in pop music and I think my magazine will only help to make this even larger.