Monday 3 February 2014

Audience Feedback Survey Results

 
 
These are the results I collected from my Survey.
 
 From my survey I have realised that I will need to make a professional, entertaining magazine that will appeal to my audience, as a few people commented that they do not read music magazines because they prefer to listen to music instead of reading about it. In order to do this, I would have to incorperate ways in which they would be able to listen to music from buying my magazine e.g. competitions to gigs/concerts/festivals and free downloads. I have also discovered that content is the most important element in the magazine to my target audience, so I must ensure that what I have included is extremely interesting and enjoyable to read about. Some of the people that responded claimed that music magazines were 'boring' and 'useless' therefore I would try and make my magazine as fun and appealing as possible in order for them to be able to enjoy it.
 








Audience Feedback

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QG7QB2X

I created a Survery on Survey Monkey to recieve feedback from various different people on their opinions and feelings towards music magazines. I feel that this is an effective way of gaining feedback as the recipients are anonymous and therefore are a good source to collect results from as it enables them to be completely honest. From the results I will be able to analyse many different people's opinions on music magazines to see how successful my magazine would be with them.

Monday 6 January 2014

Draft Q7 of Evaluation


Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back to the start of September when we made out Preliminary task it is evident that I have learnt a lot in the past few months! We created the Preliminary task using Photoshop just to get used to the programme, however we created our magazines using InDesign which was a much more professional programme to use.

Compared to Photoshop, InDesign offers a wider range of tools and elements that helped me to make my magazine more professional, whereas if we would have created the magazine on Photoshop, there is a limited amount you can do compared to InDesign. InDesign also dramatically speeds up the process as its main purpose is actually creating magazines. In regards to images, I felt that the pictures I took for my magazine were much better than the pictures I took for my Preliminary task. The white screen we used in the photoshoot helps to establish the professional feel that I was trying to capture in the making of my magazine.

Looking back to the front cover of my Preliminary magazine it is evident how much more professional my actual magazine looks. The photos are of a better quality, the sell lines have a nicer layout and overall it looks like more time and effort has been put into it.  

Draft Q6 of Evaluation


What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

As I took Media for my GCSE’s, I am very familiar with the programme Photoshop, which we previously used to create a film magazine. Therefore, I found using Photoshop to edit the images quite easy, as I had done it plenty of times before. However I learnt a few more things about how to create different kinds of effects on the images, which allowed me to put a few of my images into black and white. Photoshop also allowed me to brighten any images that I felt were too dark, and enabled me to play with the colouring. It also offers a variety of tools that help to make the image look better, including the Patch Tool, which enables you to get rid of any marks/blemishes that would make the image look more professional. Also with the actions tool, you are able to see everything you have done at different stages and you can decide if you want them to show or not. I found that Photoshop was very useful in allowing me to edit my photos in order to make them look as professional as possible.

The main programme we used to create our magazines was InDesign. I had used InDesign briefly in my GCSE’s as my teacher thought it would be a good idea to use it to do my contents page. But I wasn’t very familiar with it so I have learnt a lot since beginning our magazines on there. A great element of InDesign is that it allows you to have columns to see the right width and length that your text/images should be. By staying inside these columns I have found that it has been easier to keep my magazine looking as professional as possible. Another useful element is paragraph styles, which allows you to use a certain text size, font and colour whenever you need it. I found this extremely useful when I was creating my contents page as I wanted a Heading, a contents heading and a contents subheading, which would each be slightly different. Instead of having to alter the text each time, I could just click on the paragraph styles and apply to each bit of text whatever style I wanted to use! I found that using InDesign sped up the process of making my magazine, and allowed me to spend more time on choosing the right images, writing my main article and coming up with ideas for features to include on my contents page.

The camera I used to take the images for my magazine was a Canon SLR. This professional camera allowed me to take high quality images of my model which gave a really sophisticated feel. I used a white screen backdrop as it makes the model in the image stand out, and is also easy to edit on Photoshop.