Evaluation of College Magazine

Jasmine Gill - A level coursework

In what ways does your media product, use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My College Magazine uses features of both conventional and non-conventional magazines to form the magazine that it has become. One of the first things that I decided to do was use smaller images which relate to college and college students and place a couple of these images on the front cover, this goes against the conventional style of a magazine front cover because normally most conventional magazines use one large main image and use this as the entire background and then put text around this. I decided to use small seperate images which are dotted around the magazine front cover because I believe that by setting it out in such a way it makes the front cover seem more interesting and eye catching because since there are seperate images, there are different elements to it and different things to look at, which will appeal to a teenage/college audience because instead of it being one simple image it is a range of different images showing different aspects of college life. I also used conventional features within my magazine, I decided upon making the masthead of my magazine front cover, big, bold and striking, I decided to use bright colours on the masthead to make it stand out against the rest of the front cover, and to make this feature the first thing you see when you first look at the magazine.      

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I think that my college magazine front cover represents all college students, no matter what they are like. I think it does this because the features and stories that I have mentioned on the front cover would appeal to all college students. For example there are competetions, with cash prizes, which of course would be something that would most probably appeal to all college students since money is becoming a growing problem in todays society. As well as this there is gossip, fashion, tips on how to study and get over exam stress and lots of other things which would help all sorts of steeotypes of college students, for example fashion would relate to fashion concious students, while tips on how to study would mostly relate to studious students, but would also relate to all students in general, clearly there is at least one thing in the magazine that would interest each and every student. It will appeal to this particular age group because of course they are generally considered to be fashion concious, hard working and perhaps even a little bit rebellious, this magazine enforces these stereotypes of students, through the use of images and text.   

Who would be the audience for your media product?

College students would be the appropriate audience for my media product because of course, this is a college magazine however it is equally approriate for students who are high school leavers and are about to start college, because it doesn’t come across as a magazine that is extremely mature and targeted at adults. College students are still only between the ages of 16-18, this means that it still needs to have a fun “child-like” element to it to make it appeal to this older teenage/young adult audience. This fun element is important because even at a college age, students can become easily board and distracted if the colours, images and range of fonts and texts aren’t holding their interest and so a combination of all these things is needed to make the magazine come across as both mature but still interesting at the same time. I have used neutral colours which will appeal to both genders meaning that neither will feel pressured to read it or scared away from reading it purely based on the fact that comes across as too feminine or too manly.  

How did you attract, address your audience?

I used lots of different techniques to attract and address my audience, for example I decided to use bright colours, which appeals to the target audience and makes the front cover seem more lively and interesting. For example the use of the colour orange represents, fire, passion, energy and excitement, all of which are things which are required of a college student, which of course is why this is an appropriate use of colour to attract my audience. I did generally use neutral colours, and I didn’t actually use any colours that were gender stereotypical meaning that the magazine would appeal to both males and females. This is why I have decided to use the colours that I chose to use. Blue, white and orange are the main colours that appear on my magazine front cover, these colours look very attractive and so make the whole magazine stand out and look attractive as a whole. These are all colours which can be associated with college and students and are quite calm colours, which represent a sense of maturity and a studious attitude. I addressed the audience in a very personal manner this means that the audience will automatically be drawn in, because instead of feeling as though they are one of about a thousand readers, they feel like an individual and as though the magazine has been specifically designed to help them. Giving it this personal feel is a very good feature of a magazine because it creates a bigger impact on the target audience, and creates a loyal reading base because of this. 

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have learned a great deal about different technologies and also the process of constructing this product. Quick selection was used to allow me to select all the areas of an image so that it could be cut out from the rest of the image. It is also extemely helpful when just trying to outline certain parts of the image, to either edit or change the colours on it. I used image re-scale to rescale the image onto the magazine front cover, to do this I went to image, then I clciked on image size and then changed this accordingly. I edited the images and used the blur tool to blur out the edges of the images that I used, however afterwards I realised that this didn’t look approriate and so I used the undo button and left it to how I had originally done it.  I have also learned how to transfer images from a camera to a computer, by connecting the camera memory card to the card reader and then connecting this to the computer where I began to edit it on photoshop.