AS G321: Sophie Packer

For my media coursework I have created a music magazine which features, ‘Cylinder Kings’ a band that have broken up for several years and have now reformed. The genre of my magazine and feature article is aimed at the indie crowd. I first planned for my magazine to be original and fill a gap in the current magazine industry. However I feel that now my product is finished it is far more conventional than first planned but still offers readers what they want. My magazine is conventional as it follows very similar article styles to other well known magazines, for example my feature article is written in a question and answers form, which can be found commonly in many popular magazines such as NME. Typically of this genre there is a bold colour scheme used to create continuity, which I have tried to achieve.

My media magazine represents the indie/rock culture which is primarily men between the ages of 16-25. It represents their lifestyles – the love of live music, fashion and social interaction. I attracted the audience by using lots of images to support these criteria. Images appeal more to the target audience, who prefer the immediate satisfaction of a picture than a block of text. Having said that, my second double page spread does mainly consists of writing but in a very easy question and answers form, which appeals to the male audience. Also the front cover attracts the audience as it gives an insight to what to find in the magazine and is directed at what the audience is interested in, which includes latest music articles about their favourite artist and competition chances.

As my magazine follows the style of magazines such as NME, I believe that companies like IPC media would distribute my magazine. They would be a good company to distribute my magazine because they’re well established in this genre, so would be able to promote my magazine effectively. IPC will get my magazine into chain stores and onto the high street – shops such as WH Smiths and Sainsburys sell a wide range of magazines. The price of my magazine is £2.99 which is competitive against existing magazines of the same type.

Through the process of making my magazine I have had to learn how to use technologies such as Photoshop and Blogger. When I first started my coursework I had never used these before. It took me a while to get to grips of how to use it and learnt very much through the process of trial and error. One of the main problems I faced when using Photoshop was making sure that I had used the same text throughout my magazine. Once I realised I had been using different fonts, it was easy to fix. Another problem I faced was that the Photoshop was quite slow sometimes, which limited the progress I could make. A different technology I used to complete my coursework was blogger. I used blogger to document all my planning and research for my magazine and the magazine itself. The problem with blogger was that it didn’t always do what you were asking it to, for example you would arrange pictures but when you uploaded the post they came up completely different. It’s simplicity was actually a shortcoming – it was sometimes too basic to complete tasks to my standard.

Looking back at my preliminary task I can see how much progress I have made. The preliminary school magazine looks far more unprofessional and I can see that I haven’t made the most of the technology available. Now that I have finished my music magazine I feel that my skill levels have improved dramatically and can really be seen through the quality as compared to the preliminary magazine. I am very happy with most of my magazine, but feel my contents page does let me down. My front cover has turned out much better than first planned as last minute I changed the image which made a difference to the final outcome. This change made my front cover more aesthetically pleasing. At first I had only planned to create one double page spread, however the amount of text was too much to fit to the scale of a double page spread so I had to make another. I am very pleased with both my double page spreads as they stick to the colour scheme and think it looks professional. I think the only mistake I made was the introduction to the band – I wrote in blue and it is slightly more difficult to read compared to the rest of the text. The main improvement that needs to made is my contents page - it doesn’t fit in with the style of the other pages. The colour scheme is lacking the heavy black of the other pages, and as a result looks out of place.