16.0ct.2008

MyLinh Hoang

Magazine Evaluation

My magazine front cover does challenges the forms and convention of a real magazine, this is due to the way I have placed my magazine title, the lay out the magazine, the colours and bold font I have used.
As a whole group we have made a joint decision that our magazine will be called “Urban Beatz” this is because we think it reflect some teenagers’ life and the kind of music they listen to in today’s century and in this case will reflect on our target audience’s life and the music they listen to. The target audience of our magazine will be young teenagers and hopefully young adults will be interest to read it too.
For the month that my magazine will be issue I have chosen my target audience will be female.
Before going ahead to make this music cover I have done some of my own research by looking at different type of genre magazines, this is to see how the lay out is done, the special offer, the freebies, and what I should include to name a few, when producing my own cover. By looking at these magazines I have decided to use bright colours to make it attractive to my audience’s eyes, I also include some interesting topic such as “The real reason why my marriage collapse”, winning tickets to Pussycat dolls’ live concert to, etc. I have decided to include stuff that I think would catch my target audience’s attention when picking the magazine.

My music magazine cover can represent certain social groups due to colours, the background and the model on the front cover. This can represent teenagers so therefore relate to them.
I included particular female artists so that it could relate to the genre of the magazine and know that my female target audience will like and be interested to read.

I would distribute my magazine to “cherry red” and “EMI” media institution as they would help to improve my ideas and headlines and therefore will become buyable and very popular like “NME”.
However, I believe record companies that specialise in the Hip Hop and R n B genre such as Def Jam Records, Konvict Records and Ruff Ryders Entertainments, to name a few, would distribute our magazine front cover because it appeals to teenagers who listen to this specific genre of music.

I attracted our audience by using bold colours, bold font and by featuring promotional offers and competitions like for examples: how to win, money and concert tickets on the front cover. I chose to have my magazine background white because it will blend in with the bright clothes my model is wearing; making her stand out and attractive. The white background also help to make my main cover line, cover lines stand out and my choice of colours make our magazine look more presentable, colourful and attractive. The contents would attract our target audience because we used free signed t-shirt as a promotional offer for people who purchase our magazine, we featured exclusive interviews with R n B stars and introducing new artist, like I have done for my issue, this will attract readers because we have a good topic lines, good gossip, good prizes waiting to be win, and good exclusive interview with the stars etc.

Before producing the magazine I wasn’t very familiar with Apple Mac computers to design a magazine. Therefore I learnt how to use it properly and effectively.
I’ve used Photoshop before at my previous school and for photography but I wasn’t aware of all the techniques, I have learnt and different types tools I were able to use on my magazine cover to make it more realistic, eye catching and attractive to readers.
I think as a group and individual we have benefited from the Photoshop tutorial because it helped us to produce a good looking magazine and saved us from wasting precious time to work out all these techniques ourselves.

If I ought to produce another music magazine I would like to have more variety of pictures to choose from and have wider range of topic to include in the magazine. However, I am very happy of my final production and I believe as a group we planned the magazine cover well as we all agreed on the name, the genre and what kind of pictures we wanted for the magazine. We have used the lesson effectively and worked as a team, through out this project.
To criticise myself I didn’t do as much research on the genre my fellow group mates and I have chosen because we already knew a lot about it, so therefore we just used the knowledge we already had to help us create out magazine cover. However when writing up my magazine evaluation I did not know a lot of music companies so I have asked friends to me some of the companies’ name and then I research using “Google” to find out about them and what type of music genre they promote.