Evaluation Questions2-7

Evaluation for UMD magazine project

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

• Stereotypically, young males tend to be slightly fashion-conscious, as they intend to impress the opposite sex and want to look good. This is suggested by both images, as both have styled hair, brushed over to one side quite neatly. Both are also wearing a buttoned-up collared shirt, which is quite trendy – still supporting the intentions of impressing girls and looking good.

• Both of their poses still support the stereotype of younger males trying to act cool and impress the opposite gender which can be suggested by the indirect gaze in my image and in both images – having their heads turned away from the camera implies that they think they are cool and more important than other males their age. Young males are also stereotypically confident which is quite clearly connoted by each of their poses – NME’s image suggests confidence through Alex Turner (from Artic Monkeys)’s folded arms and my image connotes confidence through the way Ben (the subject of the photograph) is holding the edges of his shirt.Both stances also look quite laid back and relaxed, which is yet another stereotype of young males.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

• I believe that Bauer Media would distribute my magazine, as Bauer Media already covers a wide amount of different music genre magazines, but after researching the different music magazines they distribute and the genres they belong to, I noticed there was an absence of any magazine belonging to my genre of indie/indie-rock/alternative music. If Bauer Media were to publish ‘UMD Magazine’, they would widen their market to an even larger audience of readers, as their selection of music genres would almost cover every genre. The reason I decided not to go for IPC Media, is because they already publish a popular indie/indie-rock music magazine, ‘New Musical Express’, and it is unlikely that they would want two conflicting magazines within their own institution, as either magazine would affect each other’s sales.

• This is another reason why Bauer Media is the ideal institution to publish ‘UMD’, as they need to challenge competing media institutions, like IPC Media, by publishing as many music genres as possible, as it gives a reader of a certain genre an alternative to the magazine they currently read. For example, a reader of NME published by IPC Media may discover UMD magazine published by Bauer Media and begin reading it out of curiosity and they could find that they prefer the magazine published by Bauer Media as opposed to IPC Media.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Why would they buy your product?Richard would buy UMD music magazine because at £2.99 every month, it is affordable as opposed to NME which costs £2.20 every week. UMD also features artists and bands which all fit into either the indie/indie-rock genre or alternative/alternative-rock genre, which is Richard’s favourite genre of music, and there isn’t really another magazine out there which features artists just belonging to that genre. Another unique selling point for UMD magazine which appeals to Richard is that as well as featuring well-known and popular artists such as Snow Patrol, Imagine Dragons, Foster the People and The Kooks (and more) UMD balances this list of artists and bands with newcomers to the indie/alternative genre and not-so-well-known bands and artists.

Audience Profile for UMD MagazineRichard is an eighteen year old student studying in his second year of sixth form. He lives in the South East of England with his parents and owns his own black Renault Clio. Due to his studies, he doesn’t get a large amount of free time, but when he does, he normally goes out with friends or to parties at weekends, and stays in and watches some comedy TV, like Family Guy or 8 out of 10 Cats in the evenings of weekdays. When he can, he likes to go to music festivals or see his favourite bands on tour, which he pays for with the money he gets from his part-time job at Waitrose. His favourite bands are The Kooks, Imagine Dragons and Snow Patrol but he also enjoys hearing music from less well-known indie bands, as he believes that indie/alternative music offers a lot more variety than the mainstream music which is largely dominated by R&B music, which to Richard sounds all pretty much the same. Richard puts aside some of the money he earns from his part-time job to help towards the ridiculously expensive University fees, which doesn’t leave him with a lot of money to spend on himself. When he isn’t saving up his earnings for music festivals, he usually saves up his money to buy some expensive clothes from shops like Superdry or River Island and a few other popular shops. He currently purchases NME magazine, but cannot afford to buy it every week, as £2.20 every week would be too expensive. Currently, he only buys one or two magazines a month, and only when they feature his favourite artists or indie/alternative newcomers. Richard is looking for a music magazine which features both popular bands/artists but also less well-known bands/artists solely belonging to the indie/indie-rock/alternative genre. He also needs a magazine which comes out monthly for an affordable price.

How did you attract/address your audience?

• My audience consists of mainly males aged 16-late 20s/early 30s which is also roughly the average age of music festival/band tour goers, and I have addressed this by listing several competitions on the cover where readers can read about and even win tickets to some of the best festivals around.

• The bands and artists featured also attract my target audience of indie-rock/alternative fans, as the unique selling point of UMD is that there is an even mix (a ‘balance’) of both popular and well-known indie-rock/alternative artists; and not so well-known artists and some newcomers. This attracts my audience and fans of this genre, as they are always looking for good artists and bands that few people have heard of, so that when they finally do become more popular, they can say “I listened to them before they were popular”. To a fan of this genre, it makes you cool to listen to small bands and artists, as it shows that you like them for their music not just simply because everyone else likes them.

• The colour scheme I have chosen may also attract my audience, as these colours are usually associated with the indie-rock/alternative genre. They are also colours stereotypically associated with the male gender, which is the main gender for my target audience.

• The title of the magazine – ‘Unique Music Development’ also addresses my audience, as it suggests that few artists featured will sound alike and that there is a large variety within the music belonging to the genre. It also suggests that few of the artists featured are mainstream and that the main focus is on artists and bands which are developing their popularity within the music world, which attracts fans of the indie-rock/alternative genre, as these smaller bands are what they are looking for, not mainstream music which is ‘over-played’ on the radio.

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

• There were a number of different programs and websites I used to construct this project. The main ones were Adobe Photoshop, Prezi, WordPress, SlideShare, and Adobe InDesign.

• We used Photoshop to create our front covers, contents pages and double page spreads. I already knew a fair amount about Photoshop, so it was fairly easy to use this to create each of the project pieces.

• We used Prezi to present some of our research tasks, and this was certainly a lot more complicated than PowerPoint. Once I had gotten to grips with the basics however, it was fairly easy to use. I did find however, that it was a bit of a time-consumer, and I would’ve much preferred to use a more simple program like PowerPoint, as this would’ve saved me a lot of time and allowed me to spend more time on other parts of the project.

• WordPress was the blog we used to present all the pieces of our project. I found this was very complicated to use and it was very unclear how to upload and embed different files from different websites etc. This wouldn’t have been so complicated if we had only used PowerPoint and programs on the computer to present certain parts of the project, as uploading files saved on your computer was fairly easy – embedding things from websites however was not.

• We were told to use InDesign to create our double page spreads, however InDesign only saves files in an ‘InDesign’ format, and WordPress could not detect this type of file. So in the end, I had to copy and convert each piece of the double page spread over to Photoshop, which was another time-consumer. InDesign was also a lot more limited than Photoshop in terms of designing and layout and Photoshop was much easier to use.

• Lastly, SlideShare was what we used to present parts of the evaluation and some planning tasks, and this was pretty easy and straight-forward, as all you had to do was make an account, and then browse files for PowerPoint files and upload. The only problem was that the embed code given by SlideShare wouldn’t work on Wordpress, so there was another complicated way of adding to the embed code and changing some Wordpress settings.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product ?

The progression of the front cover from the preliminary task to the project cover is instantly visible, as the space on the final project cover has been used a lot more wisely, and everything is a lot more consistent on the project cover – the text size and font is very consistent and a lot neater, whilst the preliminary task’s cover has quite a few empty spaces, and the text font and size is not very consistent. Whilst the colour scheme is quite consistent on the preliminary task, it is a lot more consistent and obvious on the project cover, as even the masthead ‘UMD’ contains all three of the main colours. The graphical features and white boxes around the anchorage text on the preliminary task is very distracting from the rest of the cover, and it causes the cover to be too weighted to the left of the page making the right side seem rather empty. I’ve learnt from this on my main project cover, as it isn’t too weighted on one side than the other, only as much as other magazines like NME or Kerrang! etc. The preliminary contents page was actually very good in my opinion, so I decided to make the project contents page quite similar in some areas with a couple of improvements. The preliminary contents page did not use the masthead from the front cover, so I made sure to use the masthead from the cover to the contents page of the final project so that readers would sub-consciously be remembering the name of the magazine. I also decided to use a convention which many other music magazines’ contents pages use, which is that the images take up most of the contents page. I decided to keep the idea of having several headings in the contents page, but I made sure the headings were a lot clearer in my final project contents page, and that there wasn’t as much writing – music magazine contents pages tend to save most of the writing to the articles within the magazine with only a couple of sentences to tempt the readers into finding the specific article.Overall, I believe it is very clear that I have learnt a lot in the progression from the preliminary task to the full product.