Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
In my preliminary task I used a very basic camera compared to the camera I used for my finished front cover, I originally used the Olympus SP-720UZ X4 which was fairly standard compared to the one I used for my final piece which was a Cannon 1200d, there was a clear difference of quality which meant that I could make my product look more professional. I have learnt that the image of a magazine is crucial to the sale of the magazine; if the picture isn’t high enough quality then the potential buyer may decide against buying it, this is why I have learnt to always make your image look professional and make it a good enough quality. The quality of the image can have an effect on the rest of the page.
I have also learnt to make my feature stories relevant to the target audience not so much the genre of the magazine, what I mean by this is that there’s no point in talking about something that your specific target audience won’t care about. I have also learnt that to make your magazine successful you need to make the advertisements relevant again to your specific target audience and not so much the genre on a whole, on my preliminary task I had barely any advertisements and competitions because I knew hardly anything about target audiences which is another thing I have learnt, I have learnt that you need a target audience and you need to research is with detail to ensure the information you’re displaying in your magazine is of interest to your audience.
Another thing is have learnt is that I need to make sure the model for the pictures is dressed in some type of clothing which is related to the magazine main topic, not only this but the model should normally be the person who is being featured in the story, for example in a music magazine if the feature story is about a music artist then the model featured on the front cover probably should be the artist that is being featured because it can help to sell the magazine. If someone’s favourite artist is on the front cover of a magazine then they’re more likely to buy it because they’re interested to read about them.
I have learnt about making a magazine easier to understand, what I mean by this is for example my contents page originally wasn’t very organised and for a reader its very unattractive to look at a contents page and not understand how its organised, I altered this slightly and made the boxes hold categorises of pages within my magazine, if I was to do it again I would definitely add more boxes so there is a wider range that the reader can choose from.
If I was to do this whole magazine again then there are a lot of changes I would have made, one being that I changed the genre all together, I found it hard to do Reggae because there are very little options of magazines to collect conventions off, what I mean by this is that there aren’t many magazines out there where I can research conventions of the Reggae genre, one benefit of this is that I could create my own conventions but it was made a lot harder by the fact there are limited Reggae resources on the market in the UK.