Evaluation

Preliminary evaluation 

As Bentley states, the creative process is “The making of the new through the rearranging of the old” (Bentley 1997). I applied this to my production through looking at common conventions of magazines before I started planning my front cover and content page. Firstly, I looked at the Bodmin college magazine cover recognized clearly that it was not accurate for its purpose because it does not follow the common conventions and the pictures are long shots of a poor quality, of the same activities (which does not appeal to all) and unreadable text. Considering this, I challenged and broke existing conventions through making my magazine and resemble magazine to style the preferred appearance from primary research from my Survey Monkey. My target audience preferred the style of the Vogue magazine with Empire and Time joint second. By analysing these responses I followed some of the common conventions, for instants only one main image, having teasers around the edge and blank to represent the needs of my target audience. The majority of the time I followed the common conventions as my image was don’t in a studio like most magazine covers and has a medium close up shot too.

My magazine design represents the social group of youth. Stanley Hall said in short, “Youth never changes”. My preliminary task represents this group, as it is the Bodmin College magazine. The cover and content page use gender neutral colours thus making the magazine have a wider target audience, rather than just youths. My image can also be seen as a role model for the school especially for younger students. This helps it represent youth, which will appeal to the target audience.

I created a Survey Monkey online asking my target audience what type of stories, mast-heads, font and images they preferred to make the magazine appeal to them as much as possible without focusing on just one particular age. After making this I posted on Facebook for people to answer it. I managed to get 15 responses and from this I identified what my target audience would like to see in the magazine and their favourite topics. Out of the total number of people who answered the questionnaire, the Vogue cover was most popular thus showing me to use it as a style model.

For making this product I have learnt how to use Survey Monkey, Blogger and have advanced my skills using Photoshop and InDesign. I have never used Blogger before and have never successfully used Survey Monkey either. However I picked up the skills fairly quickly with both of these programs and as I used it more often it became easier to use. I already knew how to use Photoshop, but now I have the ability to advance my editing to a higher level and now I find it easier to edit images properly. Finally, I have also learnt about how a magazine is presented to its audience and I can now see that the College magazine was not presented correctly to its target audience and not at a very good quality standard. Having these tolls at my disposal made it easier to present my product to my audience.

I did have my pros and cons with the preliminary task. Firstly the good parts were learning how to use different programs and how they work. This will help me in my project for editing images and distributing it to my audience. I found that having good images really help too as I had minimal editing to do because of this. However I could have improved on parts of this task, for instants I could have used a more adventurous mast head and made the colours more unisex. If I was to do this again, I would make sure I change these sections that I could improve on and make a clearer mast head that appeals to my target audience and make sure the text is readable.