The features we spotted on the magazine covers we analysed, there was always a masthead on the top half of the magazine, which told us what it was called. We then saw on some magazine covers there were these bold callouts, but those were rare, there wasn't many. On most magazines there were headline, but they were quite small, they are just there telling us what would be in the magazine. And then most of all there was a big picture covering the whole of the magazine cover, which is the main thing, which should be on a magazine cover. On most magazines there is a splash which is the main front page story, that tends to be a lot bigger than the headlines. we included all these features in our own magazine. I found that most magazine cover mastheads tend to be capital letters, but we decided to be different and do our masthead in lower-case letters, probably to reduce the ascenders and the descenders.
2. Who would be the audience of your media product?
The audience for this media product is college students. We made our front cover look quite funky, which made it look more towards the college students audience, because it would attract more of that age. Also at C1 on the jicnar scale, and would also attract more radicals, people who want to be more individual.
3. How did you attract/address your audience?
I attracted the audience by using a different kind of font for the masthead but i also used a normal but also kind of funky font for the rest of the front cover to connote the funky look for the college students magazine. I thought that orange and yellow with be quite good colours for the front cover, because they are bright and colourful, so it would attract people, but i thought those colours would go well with the theme of the front cover. when taking the photograph for the background i wanted it to still go with the funky theme, so i thought the library would be a good place, because of the colourful books behind to connote the happiness and liveliness of the vibrant colours. For the rest of the texts on the front cover we used a basic white colour, this is effective in some ways, because they still stand out, but not as much as the rest of the texts on the front cover, this makes it more minimal.
4. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
For our magazine front cover we have had to use many different programs, such as Photoshop, InDesign, and we have had to use different items, such as the Digital SLR cameras. i have learnt a lot from using all these different features and now I'm a a lot more confident with using these different program's.
We used a Digital SLR camera to take our front cover photo. I have learnt a lot more about these cameras, such as the settings we had to have them on, to take the right sort of photo. we had to have it on the picture of a woman, which is a setting to focus on the person, and then makes the background look blurry, which makes the photo look very effective for the front cover.
On InDesign we used this for our contents page, and we found this changeling to start with, but now we have got the hang of it. We used this program to do any interesting and different font feature for the title 'Contents'. we then thought it would be interesting and changeling to do something different with the text on this page, so we decided to wrap the text around the persons body, we found this changeling to start with, but when you know how to do it, its quite easy. Firstly we had to create a layer on photoshop, and then transfer it on to InDesign.
Now we have been introduced to these different programs to help us create a well designed and professional looking magazine front cover, we would not have been able to do it so easily without these different programs, well it would have been much harder to achieve the standard we have achieved.
We used photoshop for our front cover of our magazine. We found this changeling at the beginning and then we got used to it. we used many different features, such as the move tool, all the basic tools. Then we figured out how the layers on photoshop worked. when we had figured all these different features out, it got quite easy from then on. We learnt how to use the magnetic lasso tool, so part of the masthead was covered up by the picture, which we found quick effective. We found different shapes we could use for a callout, we picked the jigsaw puzzle piece. we used a vibrant and bright colour for this, so it stands out.
Blogger has been very useful for this project, because you can keep track of everything you have done, and you can access it really easily at home. Its also well organized you can understand everything, because it neat and easy to read. Blogger is a useful part of media studies because you know where everything is on blogger, and you can see what you need to finish and if everything is organized and if you are missing anything. And at the side of your blog page, it keeps a track of what you've done and when you did it, which is useful.
