Preliminary: Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of a school magazine?
One way my product uses the conventions of a school magazine is by having the masthead at the top of a page. A masthead is a convention of a school magazine as all magazines have them. I know this is a convention because all of the school magazines I have researched have one. I chose to use this convention on my preliminary work as it makes the magazine easily recognisable to the audience as it's the first thing to stand out, also I have used this convention as it links in with my magazines purpose.

A way my product develops the conventions of a school magazine is how the cover includes more than one image. I know that I have developed this convention because of the school magazines that I have researched only usually include one image. I chose to develop this convention so I could make my magazine look more interesting (To draw in the audiences attention). Also, having more than one image shows that there's more than one story inside my magazine, making it more appealing and making the audience want to read the magazine more.

 

 

Examples of other school magazines. All of these images include just one image on the cover, showing that I have developed the typical convention of a school magazine having just one image.

One of the ways my product challenges the conventions of a school magazine front covers is because I've not used a typical convention of a school magazine, as I've used more than one picture on the cover. I decided to challenge this as I thought it looked better with more pictures on, rather than just one picture which could look plain and boring. I chose to break away from typical conventions as I wanted my magazine to stand out more and be more unique.

 

How effective is the front page of your magazine in focusing on the ethos (core beliefs) of the school?

My magazine front cover is effective in some ways to fit within the school's ethos. Biddulph High School's core belief is for their pupils to "Aim for the highest" (As stated on the schools website). To fit with this belief of the school, my cover includes a "GCSE Results Success" cover story, this therefore links in with pupils aiming for the highest and achieving success. My cover also focuses on the schools ethos of "Respect, Dignity, Pride" as my cover includes two pictures of smartly dressed 6th form pupils, showing that they take pride in the appearance.

What have you learnt from your audience's feedback?

The first person I asked about my preliminary work, commented on how I should of linked my cover more towards the school's ethos/core beliefs as this would of given the school a better overall image. In order to do this I'd maybe put the schools ethos message of "Respect, Dignity, Pride" on the cover/contents page etc. A second person commented on the fact that my background on my cover is plain, and has a lot of "dead space" around the images and text.

 

How did you use the new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? 

In order to research for both my cover page and contents page for my school magazine, I used the Internet (Google), in order to search for examples of other school magazines, This allowed me to base my own preliminary work off other school's magazines. Also I used the Internet (Dafont.com) to get the fonts I used on both my cover page and contents page.  To create my cover page and contents page; I used Adobe Fireworks instead of using Photoshop due to it being much easier to use and I'm familier with it. On this software I cut out my images, added backgrounds, fonts and effects.