Michael's magazine evaluation

The title of my magazine is 'Mix It Up' and it will be issued every two weeks (twice month). It is a hip-hop and funky house magazine which gives it a unique feature as hardly any magazine focus on music genres that different from each other, in the same magazine. I designed the magazine cove rin such a way that it was laid out as if it was a real and offical magazine, in order for it to appeal to potential readers. I did this through the different forms of layout such as alignment of texts, the positioning of images and the diffrent styles of writing, such as font size and punctuation. I also gave it a good deatil of colour and animation in order for it to catch the reader's attention, but at the same time, not too 'cartoony' as if it appeals strictly to children; i tried to keep it to a professional standard. By tradition, i kept the title of the magazine in the top left hand corner of the front page, and it was displayed in the largest and most vibrant font a sthis is one of the main selling points and regonition strategies of any magazine; its title.

On the front cover of my magazine, I featured a large image of the primary artist who is also the most well known, and due to their higher staus than the other artists on the page, they ar emore likely to attrat more attention due to their wider publciity adn fame. I also used controversial and 'shocking!' headlines such as short phrases and claim in order to interest the reader once they pick up the magazine, such as scandalous affairs and relationships feautred within it.

As for appeal, I fell that my magazine focuses on a young generation; people in their mid-teens to early 20s. This is due to the fact that after research, i found that this was the target audience that were most fammiliar and orientated to these genres of music, and thus making the themed magazine more appealing to them. For example, it was unlikely that they would be interested on a music magazine based on 'Opera' or 'Classical' music. I would not advise people who aren't fans of this type or music, or music of this kind to necessarily buy this magazine because it simply is not orientaed towards them. 'Funky House' especially is deemed as a very vibrant and explosive genre in itself, in terms of its versatility and large area differentiation as a type of music; therefore the theme i.e colours, language and design of my magazine correlated with its representation. My magazine is very colourful and 'interestingly' presented. In other words, its presentationw ill not bore you.

When giving my magazine an 'image', I tried to give it a humourous and positive image as I know that a lot of young people generally follow and copy the images of their favourite artists and musicians. Because music is such an inspirational and influencial form of art, it is important that the right type of message is sent out to it's readers; most of which are still young at mind, and are likel to immitate certain things they read or see. Media itself, is a promotion of music too; it is what seperates a well designed image, text, or magazine as a whole, from a poorly, edited, designed one. There is clearly a lot of technology invovled through Media in creating such a prudct as I witnessed firsthand when using 'Adobe Photoshop' software. I could finally understand why it takes so much time for publishers and designers to make different issues of real, respected and mainstream magazines.

It requires alot of hard work and dedication to get things just right, but at the same time, making every issue unique in its own way. When beginning the project, I initial thought that it was going to be 'a piece of cake', and be very straighfoward and easy, but this was not the case, and I wish I had included more planning in my project beforehand. However, I was glad with the eventual outcome.
From this project, I feel I gained vital skills such as:
1) new presentational devices, and they way their use has an impact on readers
2) how Adobe Phtoshop is used
3) why planning and organisation is important beforehand

If i could change one thing on my magazine cover project, I would change the scale of images and try another orientation int erms of presentation, just to see how it would differ to my eyes, personally. Although I was happy with the outcome, the psotioning of images was a little repetitive in comparison to other magazines that people were producing in lesson; I would liek to be able to add aunique touch to mine in another way. I would also prefer if I had had more time to work on my magazine; I was away for about 1 or 2 lessons, so I did not get to finally analyse it physically. In the end, I believe the project was successful, and I am happy with the outcome.