Evaluation- First Draft/bit

Started my evaluation today as i had nothing better to do but realised i could only do 2 thirds of it. well 1.5 thirds of it.

Shazam-

Product Account Summary

Brief: To research, plan and produce various elements of a new teen magazine aimed at either sex aged 16-19 years

When my group were given the brief the majority of us already had a solid vision of how we would like to see the magazine. So we divided the magazine industry into different genres of what we thought made up what type of magazines are sold and came up with a variety of different genres such as music, films and fashion. We found that these all came under the main category of ‘lifestyle magazines’, and found that these magazines are most dominant on the market. As a group we all already had a definitive idea on how we wanted our magazine to look and read and found that we had already come up with the premise of the magazine early on in post production. We all settled on the idea that our magazine covers were to be minimalist and appealing to the eye before we had done any market research because we all felt that we were all capable in the photography and image department based on a previous task set by our teacher also we all felt that magazines loaded with front cover content looked tacky and were far too common place and agreed the mode of address should be informal but at the same time intellectual.

When we started to do our research we wanted to gauge an idea of what magazines were and were not selling at the moment and to do this we used an ‘ABC Consumer Magazine Roundup’ website on the internet. From here we looked at the circulation figures of magazines from all aspects of the market from women’s monthly magazines to music magazines and analysed what were selling and what were not. To much of our disbelief we found that most of the magazines that we thought were doing well ,due to ignorance, such as the men’s lifestyle magazine ‘FHM’ were at a lost of 15.1% and failing to sell 56,114 than in their previous year. This how ever did not affect us as we had no intention of branching off into this type of magazine with the likes of ‘Zoo’ and ‘Nuts’ as due to recent findings, these magazines were at a loss and we all had our different views on what was wrong with these magazines whether it was their misogynistic nature or the lack of vocabulary. However as we were aiming our magazine more to teenagers we looked to the teenage magazine circulations and found they were all dominated by female magazines such as ‘Sugar’ and ‘Mizz’. After much more cross referencing and researching we had finally our set of ideologies as to what our magazine would abide by, it was to be; released monthly as to stand out as more of a collectible opposed to a disposable weekly that is forgotten about, it was to be aimed at males but still appeal to females as to not narrow our target audience and the whole premise of the magazine was to be ‘alternative’ in terms of music, fashion, films and culture as we had not come across another magazine like it. As a group we watched in class as our fellow magazine groups bustled around the class asking questionnaires as research for their magazines, we how ever chose not to do this as we thought they were unreliable, after all they were asking their opposition in terms of how their magazine should unfold. So we developed our idea to our liking with intent of getting feedback at a later time. This I feel was a vital decision that I feel helped us. We did have a idea that involved a viral marketing campaign via ‘Myspace’ that involved setting up a page for the magazine and taking feed back, we however decided against this as it would of taken just as long to set up a ‘Myspace’ and receive a substantial amount of feedback than it would creating the magazine.

The idea of our magazine being alternative comes from the lack of magazines like that out at the moment and we felt it went hand in hand with our focus on aesthetics. We do have 3 competitors though in the form of ‘Flux’, ‘Pop’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. We stemmed many of our ideas from them as they are monthly and appeal to both sex. We also identified them as being alternative just by looks as the covers of ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Flux’ portray an alternative look of magazine via the use of models on the covers as they stray from the normal cover model and all 3 of the magazines have a focus on image. We also found that these magazines all have a rather solid loyal fan base as well.

After analysing 3 covers 2 of which from our competitors we came up with a name for the magazine, originally we thought of ‘Trend’ but didn’t think it fitted, we then saw that the name was staring us in the face, ‘Alt.’, we liked this because it summed the magazine up and was small and easy to remember. We then split the magazine into 4 parts film, music, culture and fashion and each person in the group was given a category. I chose film as I feel it went hand in hand with my other as-level film studies. Also I already had an initial idea of ‘top 10 action films’ and an idea for a front cover. This however I changed later on as I thought that ‘action’ films was not too alternative and therefore not in touch with the magazine. So I came up with another I dear of an article on cult films, I had dropped the ‘top 10’ idea as I felt it was too clichéd and I also asked my peers and they advised me to do that as well. I then came up with mock ups for my front cover and a first draft of my article and I exhibited them to my peers and drew feed back and acted on that opposed to a questionnaire at the start of production, this gave me more freedom to implement my own ideas and these ideas were well received any way.

Our first piece of production as a group was to come up with a style in which the mast head was going to take, we had decided on a style similar to that of ‘Pop’ in which the title also looks like a logo and is easily recognisable so we quickly found a suitable font in the form of ‘Billo’ and came up with this;

ALT*

We liked this as we felt it was open to lots of different colour combinations to suit the different covers colour schemes, we also replaced the ‘.’ With a ‘*’ when we found it looked better, our peers agreed. From here we all took our verified mock ups and set off our separate ways and started taking photos for our double page spreads and front covers with the intention of getting them into Photoshop Elements on the Mac computers to manipulate the photos to our liking. Luckily in our group was some one highly skilled in this area who was a tremendous help in regards of this as she changed colours of existing images and changed the look of other photos such as making colour stand out more. We did have some problems along the way, on of the people in my group had completed his cover and in a flash Photoshop closed down unexpectedly and erased it as well as corrupting the data with in my plugged in USB which included a copy of my front cover. We were unable to recover the cover so had to start again.

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-Alex x