Preliminary Task: The final result - Evaluating "Grades and Babes"

This is how our front page finally turned out, after around four to five hours work on Adobe Photoshop. In my opinion it looks very successful, and proffesional. But in some places i can pick out a few faults, that i will learn from and remember not to make in my actual product. An example of one of these mistakes is maybe our front page is a bit too full of images, and the mid close up model has his eyes almost touching another image which looks untidy. But on the other hand, if you look at our planing, you can see our final front cover looks as if it has stuck to our design sketch which i think is a positive thing.

Questions concerning mine and my partners magazine cover...

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

Like almost every real magazine on the market, our magazine uses a large, confident masthead which suprisingly covers our models head, whereas most of the time it is the models that cover the masthead. Our magazine cover uses a few realistic looking straplines, a price, issue number and even a barcode to add to the proffesional effect intended. Just like a real magazine, our front cover has a few inset images and a mid close up photograph which as mentioned previously may be positioned a little too crowded, but in my opinion still looks effective.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

As mentioned in the planning section of this blog, our magazine would be aimed at a young male audience, who generally follow the trend and are into nothing more than getting through college with the best results, aswell as the best girl.

How did you attract/address your audience?

We thought we would attract our intended audience by making our magazine cover appear casual and friendly, aswell as new and fresh, unlke real college magazines, which are covered in pictures of unrealistic situations and obviously fake smiles.

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

Overall, the most important thing ive came out with from this is, the general use of Quark express. Because before this project, i didnt even know the program existed, yet now i can produce fairly simple, but effective pieces of work, such as the contents page me and my partner also created for this magazine.

Preliminary Task: Mine and my partner's planning of our college magazine.

Me and my partner began brainstorming on the genre and target audience of our magazine, we decided it would probably be easier for us if we aimed our magazine at young males about our age and in our situation (college etc.)

After we decided our target audience would be aimed at young studying males, we tried to think of a way to make it seem a bit less nerdy, compared to a regular college magazine on how to get the grades. Thats where the babes came in. we decided at this age its typical for boys to be constantly thinking about the opposite sex, with some exceptions of course.

We then started noting down other factors that would need to be considerd, such as font and colour and layout. And importantly, our college magazine name, which after lots of trial and error was chosen to be "grades and babes"

After we had the majority of our plan set out, (see drawings) we started photographing the models for ourmagazing, which would either be used on the front page, or the contents page that we also had to make. When we had taken enough photographs, we scanned them into the computer and began actually creating our front page (using adobe photoshop) and our contents page (using Quark Express).