Foundation Portfolio Evaluation By Katie Rowan – 12EIB

THE CRITERIA I WILL COVER Intend To Cover Technologies we used to produce it-Institutions and potential distributors - Technologies we used to produce it-Institutions and potential distributors Audience + how the final product addresses it -Audience + how the final product addresses it - Forms and conventions of music magazines

INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT Our project was to create a music magazine. We created a blog to document our progress in the processes we went through to get to our finished product. The website we used to create this blog was Wordpress - ( The software I used to create my front cover was Adobe Photoshop cs4. I used Adobe Illustrator cs4 to create my double page and contents page. While at first a novice using the software, I eventually got my head around it and got there in the end!

4 INSTITUTIONS + DISTRIBUTORS The institution I think would be most likely to distribute BRIT MUSIC is Bauer publishing, which also distributes the popular rock magazines KERRANG! and Q. The magazine was priced at £0.99, markedly cheaper than others - KERRANG! is £2.50, and Q is £2.00

My magazine had an audience demographic of 13-19, meaning that the vast majority of its potential consumers would be in secondary education, and therefore unlikely to be earning their own income. With this in mind, I made the price of the magazine £0.99, an affordable price on the average (working class or middle class teenagers weekly pocket money of £5.00. Though I had no set gender bias for the magazine, the fact that the picture were mainly of females My chosen audience for Brit Music was the age band of , a select audience that would be interested in recent pop music, which was what my magazine mainly featured. This is similar to my original plan, which was to target an audience that would be interested in narrower genres such as pop-punk and pop-rock. By doing the general genre of pop overall, I was able to encompass both of the smaller genres, in effect widening my audience. I addressed my audience by giving the magazine a youthful feel, featuring pictures of young people as the artists, representing them as fun and approachable. I also did this by having up-to-date and current artists featured on the front in the form of sell lines. I also included free posters and a quiz, things that –from my own personal experience- because young people to want to buy a magazine. AUDIENCE AND REPRESENTATIONS

6 FORMS & CONVENTIONS 1IMAGE: Large medium close up of Emma Palmer. Central image in the middle of the page, drawing the attention of the reader. The sunglasses Emma wears and the black of her cardigan connote an aura of mystery, paired well with her cheeky expression. TEXT: The red, white and blue colour theme of denotes the British theme of the magazine, fitting in with the magazines title of Brit Music. TEXT 2: The column inch features all of the less important articles, leaving the focus to be on the cover stories.

FORMS & CONVENTIONS 2 TEXT: The red, white and blue colour theme of denotes the British theme of the magazine, fitting in with the magazines title of Brit Music. The fonts I used were Anderson Four Feathers (for the title), Wilderness (for the tagline), Just The Way You Are for the sell lines, Jellyka, Cutty Cupcakes for the second feature article and Birth of a Hero for the quiz hook. Upon reflection, I probably should have used less fonts for improved cohesion, but at the time using varied fonts was more aesthetically pleasing. IMAGE: Large medium close up of Emma Palmer. Central image in the middle of the page, drawing the attention of the reader. The sunglasses Emma wears and the black of her cardigan connote an aura of mystery, paired well with her cheeky expression.

FORMS AND CONVENTIONS 3 Callout to draw the readers attention and give a feel of what the article is like Lead-in summarises what is going to be in the article in terms of the content; the artists name, age and relevance to the music industry Lead-out follows the convention of music magazines in promoting the most recent record the artist who is being interviewed has produced, usually in prelude to its release. Q & A format follows conventions of magazine interviews, highlighting the difference between the interviewer and interviewee with use of alternating colours

FORMS AND CONVENTIONS 4 Page number on photo for reader to easily be able to locate the article they want Pages in numerical order, split into the two categories of the kind of content they are Cohesion created by the repeated use of the cover title font

10 PROGRESSION I improved a number of skills between my preliminary production and my main production. I improved my photography skills by becoming bolder in the way I framed a photograph. I wasnt so afraid of getting close up to the subject. I learned to position my main image somewhere slightly off centre to make it more appealing on the eye. I still found it harder to control lighting and that is something I would like to continue to work on. I developed my digital editing skills over the course of the project. I became more familiar with photoshop and became more skilled in altering the hue and saturation of my images. I was also able to enlarge and crop pictures when appropriate. CS4 was new to me but I gradually became more confident about placing and layering objects on my pages. I developed my design skills as well. As I said, I took better photographs for my music magazine and followed the forms and conventions of existing magazines more closely.