Evaluation Question #2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

On the front cover, a member of my target audience is portrayed as the subject of the front cover. Instantly someone who an audience can relate to, he is listening to music, wearing DC clothing, stood in front of a colourful palette. This house style of the cover adds up to represent the young adult and teenage audience as a mainly hedonist crowd who enjoy listening to music, mainly of the electronic genre.

I have aimed to represent a young audience through my chosen genre of electronic rock. This is an increasingly popular genre amongst teenagers and younger adults, and the front cover image represents my chosen audience well through showing a typical teenage reader. I have used images in my magazine however I think there is more text. I have included pictures on the contents page to add to the content and break up the text and make it nicer to look at, and I have included a large background image on the double page spread. The photo on the DPS shows a youthful band in live session, the demographic of which my audience could relate to.

The magazine shows a laid back and informal quality with sans-serif artistic fonts, very colourful background graphics with light effects (such as the Lens Flare on the cover masthead, and the lighting used on the background graphics on the contents page). Magazines that try to show good-quality and possibly value for money, such as Q which focuses on the indie/rock genre, use a calmer colour palette and some serif fonts in their titles. However these magazines are often for an older audience so I decided that I would not go for this approach and try something a little more graphically imaginative.

Evaluation Question #1

In what ways does your media product use

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The completed set

So for ease of readers here's my completed set of;

Cover
Contents page
Double page spread (I decided to go for the one with no quote. Avoided having to look at it on an angle. I also checked the spelling and grammar...)

Also the image sizes are pretty huge so you may want to wait for them to load ;-)

CONTENTS = DONE

Here's my contents page. I tried to maintain the same colourful theme as the cover page and tried to stick to the layouts I proposed earlier.

COVER = DONE

This is my (hopefully) finished first front cover draft. Please let me know what you think of it...

Cover - In the making...

I've been working on the cover page for the last couple of days using the Adobe Photoshop CS5 software. I've been learning loads of stuff along the way, and took on a fair bit of know-how from the similar Elements program I used to create the double page spread.

Rather than find an image that shows live band/music I've decided to go for a simple subject person on my front cover, slightly offset to the right to allow for coverline space. We did the photo-shoot for this last week with Steve (who features on the cover) stood in front of a white wall. This made the photo easier to work with later on as I could then crop Steve from the image and place a background behind him.

This was the photo I chose out of around 15 to use on my front cover...I cropped Steve using the magnetic lasso tool and afterwards the background eraser tool with a small brush. I then changed the hue, saturation and contrast of Steve to make him a look a little more radiant and more suitable for the front cover of a magazine. I created a shadow behind Steve by selecting the cropped-out Steve, feathering it by 30px, painting it black and finally altering the opacity to 70%.


This feathering effect to create a subtle shadow was also used behind the text box created for the coverlines. This helped to visually separate them from the background graphic, rather than have no visual difference between the two and just having a general conglomeration of colours which would not have been easy on the eye.

I went for a colourful, eye-catching background graphic and general colour scheme. I thought it may be a good idea to match the cover image (namely Steve's clothes) with the colour scheme, so I used a pink/green/blue scheme with some small black/white chequered areas. The background image was created using the '80's Kung Fu' photoshop brushes that I downloaded from BrushKing.

The draft of the cover I've almost finished making (with just minor additions - it's text for the coverlines, strapline,  price) is very intricately designed and has around twelve layers with each particular area of the cover on it, for example Steve + the shadow is on a completely different layer to the masthead, strapline, coverline text box and background graphic.

I think the mad colour scheme and the lighting effects I added to the masthead/title works well in keeping with the electronic music theme and the name of the magazine 'Strobe' is very fitting.

So here is what I have so far:

Just a couple of questions to ask you,

- Should I keep the same colour scheme and use it in elements of the contents page and the DPS?

- In your opinion, how could it be improved?

DPS = DONE

Please let me know what you think of the edits to the double page spread. I hope to have finished it now, but if you have any ideas on how I could improve it please let me know via comments :)

I've done a version with the quote in two different places and completely without it, which do you prefer?

(Click on the image to view full-size)


Thank you!!