Questionnaire Results

In todays lesson, we counted up our results from our hand out questionnaire and grouped them. After i tallied them up, i then use the software Microsoft excel to create graphs with my data, here are some of  my data graphs...


What gender are you?

I used this question in my questionnaire hand out because it would give me a brief outline of who to aim my magazine at as it tells me which gender prefer to read my genre magazine, and i would take this into consideration as it would determine my target audience.

How often do you buy music magazines?

I have included this question so i can get a rough estimate on how frequently people buy music magazines, in order for me to base my release of my magazine.

What genre magazine do you prefer to read?

I chose this question for my survey as it gives my a rough idea on what genre the population prefer to read, so this means i would have a wider target audience.



Questionnaire

Codes and conventions of a double page spread

In today's lesson we were told to bring in a music magazine in which we were to analysise the codes and conventions of a double page spread. We got into groups were we then compared some double page spreads from different magazines to come up with what they had in common. These are some of the points we came up with: 

- there is normally an image on the left hand side of the double page spread covering the intire page, however sometimes they can bleed from one section to another.

- Consistant colours are used throughout the double page spread.

- The credits; also known as by line are placed at the bottom to credit the photographer and writer.

- Drop quotes are used on the page, the text is from the article.

- The stand first is above the article but below the masthead.

- Generally, on a double page spread there are roughly 3-4 columns.

- A large masthead is used at the top of the article, the masthead stands out from the rest of the article.

- The images used have captions.

- The double page spread has a page number either side to tell the reader what page they are on.

- The font used for the article is size 11 and normally Ariel or Times New Roman.

- The artist name is higlighted.

- The tone of the article is formal, which connents to the audience to allow them to relax.

Analysising contents pages

In today's lesson we used a new media software on the internet, called Prezi. This software was new for all of us, this anables me to upload my annotated contents page to a blank canvas were i then could play around with text and images to make it look more interesting instead of uploading it to my blog. I found the new software easy and straight forward to use, from using this new software i now have gained more skills on different types of media softwares.The link below will take you to my Prezi presentation where you can view my annotations of a contents page of my chosen Indie genre.

(Please click to view my Prezi)
http://prezi.com/vvrl6vlj6uwd/contents-analysis/

Analysing front covers

In todays lesson we analyised front covers of different well known music magazines such as: NME, Kerrang and Mojo and compared them against the codes and conventions of front covers and heres what i found...

Inital plans for my music magazine

I am roughly going to price my magazine at £2.00 -£3.00. Most magazines have roughly 70-120 pages so my magazine will consist of roughly 90 pages. My magazine will be released weekly. The featured articles will be an interview with the band. And the regular content will be of upcoming gigs and album release dates etc... 

Main Task: Intial plans for my magazine

In todays lesson we were set the task to research well known music magazines and to find out information about them. We used the internet to find the different websites to the magazines, from there we then found out the following information....

Kerrang:

• Weekly
• Roughly £1.99 - £2.10
• Size: unknown
• Regular content: News, Liver review, Album release.
• Featured articles: Band of the week
• Website: http://www.kerrang.com
• Producer website:  www.bauermedia.co.uk

NME:     

•  Weekly
• Price - £2.30
• Size - roughly 70- 82 pages
• Regular content - Band index
• Featuring Articles - Live, Album, News
• Manager: Paul Mcguinness 
• Website: www.nme.com/magazine
• Producer website: http://www.ipcmedia.com/  

MOJO:

• Monthly
• Between £1.90 - £2.40
• Size: unknown
• Regular content: Live, News on upcoming events, Album releases
• Featured articles: Band of the week, new artists and soloist.
• Website: http://www.mojo4music.com/
• Producer website: http://www.bauermedia.com/

My Inital Ideas for my magazine

After researching music magazines such as "Q", "Kerrang" and "Mojo" i have decided to do the genre Indie because it has a wider target audience, which would be people who enjoy listening to Indie music.

Evaluation of school magazine

My task was to design and create a school magazine following the codes and conventions of any magazine. To achieve this I observed relevant magazines to suit my genre e.g. Weather Report. After getting idea's and a rough outline of what a school magazine generally consists of i started to construct my magazine.

Firstly, I chose a name for my magazine which was relevant to the genre. I had many different ideas for magazine names e.g. "Fact", "achieve" and "WHS" but I chose "WHS" as it is a shortened version of Weatherhead. I have used colloquialism in my title as it aims more towards my target audience school pupils and students. My masthead would be placed in either the top left hand corner of the page or running across the top, this is a general codes and convention of any magazine. After settling on a title, i then had to think of several feature articles and several regular content articles. The articles that i chose were relevant for my genre but also relevant to my target audience. The codes and conventions of articles is that they are all the same font and generally the colour is cohesive to the masthead. After choosing my masthead and articles i then drawn a brief sketch of what my front cover and contents page will look like.

From then i took a camera around the school grounds and took pictures for my front cover and my contents page. I took different frames and angles of images to assure i capture them as best as i could for my magazine. Magazines generally consist of having a central image, i chose to have a medium close up of a student holding their exam results in front of them. To make my image the background i used Adobe Photoshop to achieve this. This programme is good to use when creating a magazine to make it more professional as you can, crop, edit the image, edit texts, edit the colours and change the image. I found Photoshop a really good programme to create my front cover as it was easy to use and follow. However, the cons of using Photoshop is that you can't use it to produce a contents page as there are no guidelines for your featured articles.

After creating my front cover i then used QuarkXPress to create my contents page. This was the first time i had used Quark and found it enjoyable but at the same time hard work as i was picking up on news skills and techniques. I found this programme easier to use for my contents page as guidelines where provided. These guide lines would prevent any images or texts being cut off. The cons of QuarkXPress is that it is more complicated to use then Photoshop and you cannot get the precise size of an image to fit on your page as you can't resize the image to a desired size. 

Overall i think i had worked hard on achieving the out come of my magazine, however i would change the following: i would of spent more time on my initial draft as it was a baseline of what the final product should look like yet my magazine didn't aspire to be the exact same as the images i had captured were unreliable as i put down as an article "Italian exchange" this proved difficult to capture a image due to the location. For my main task i will take on board what i found as my weaknesses and try and improve on them to achieve a better product outcome. 

Contents page for my school magazine

I created my contents page on QuarkXPress Passport 7.5.

Front cover created on Adobe Photoshop

Using Quark

Scaling image to the size of the box.

In today's lesson we used Quark Passport 7.5 to create our Contents page. Quark was a whole new programme which i hadn't used before but i found it easy to follow and found it more satisifying to produce a contents page. Firstly, i created a new document with consisted of three seperate columns. I then added a picture to my contents page the image that i used corresponds to the featured article on the front cover. To achieve this i simply clicked on the image tool featured on the left and drawn a box significant to the size of the image. To import the picture i simply right clicked and imported the picture of my choice.

To insert my title, i also click on the text box at the left hand side of the programme, i drawn a text box at the top of the page and clicked on the hand icon on the left hand side to enable me to insert my text. I then changed the font and colour so it is cohesive with the front cover.

To insert columns i also clicked on the text box icon and drawn a text box within the three columns and inserted my Featured articles and Regualr conent. If the text was too long for the text box drawn a red cross would show up, from then you would click on the "Chain" icon situated on the left and then click on the empty text box the writing that was not visible would then be moved over to the empty text box.

Using Photoshop to create my front cover

In today's media lesson we uploaded the image that was going to be used on the front cover of our magazine to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a programme where you can create magazines, CD covers, Posters etc... After uploading my central image to Photoshop i then had to use the magnetic cutting tool on the left, to enable to remove the image from the back ground. I had to carefully draw around the area of my choice and then clicked on "select", "inverse" this automatically inverses and highlights the background which was then to be deleted. The image left was then used on my front cover.

Final images for school magazine

Preliminary task

Photographs for school magazine

We were given a task to capture images for our school magazine. We were put into pairs and were given a camera. From then we went around the school to capture necessary images that correspond to the featured articles on the front cover and on the contents page. After capturing our images, we uploaded them onto a computer via a USB cable.

Final images for school magazine

After uploading our images, i sorted through the images which i was going to use for my magazine. After sorting through my pictures i used Adobe Photoshop to resize and edit my pictures in order for me to put them onto my magazine.