My Foundation Portfolio Evaluation:

 

For my media studies Foundation Portfolio project I chose Desktop Publishing. I was required to create a front cover, contents page and double page spread feature for a music magazine of the genre I have chosen. I chose Independent music on the basis that I am a big fan and that it gave me a wide berth of different artists I could create and feature in my magazine. I worked by myself with occasional help from fellow students and teachers. I contributed to the project in that I created everything from my very own hand crafted typeface for the masthead, down to taking the photographs of the musicians.

         If I was looking for a media institution to distribute my magazine I would probably use EMAP. EMAP is the publisher for popular UK magazines such as Q, Mojo and Kerrang! EMAP is a great choice because it produces Mojo, a magazine that focuses coverage on bands that often sway towards the alternative and independent genres. EMAP is also a good choice because it’s a British company, and so would be proficient in helping my British magazine; it would be a company that would be good at marketing my magazine to a British audience, which is a very important part of my magazine’s success. I believe my product is unique because it focuses on the very independent and unsigned acts that, because of their background and label, are able to keep free reign of their music and give this to their loyal fan base. This fan base would form a very large chunk of my consumers.

         Almost all other magazines focus on the mainstream, manufactured artists and bands, the musicians who saturate airwaves and top charts. My magazine is the complete opposite. This is why I believe there is a solid niche in the market I can fill with my publication and therefore make a profit for the publisher, that’s why they would want to distribute my magazine. According to my quiz, two of the three people interviewed also agree with there being a solid niche of customers with disposable income to tap into. My articles are completely focused upon the underground music scene and the quality of writing is good enough to keep an intelligent reader happy to keep moving from page to page and stay interested with my content. I know this is true because all three of the people I quizzed said they enjoyed reading my main article.

         In terms of an audience for my publication I would say my magazine would mainly appeal to males rather than females. If I were to guess I would say 70% to 30% Male to Female respectively, my research reflects this as the two most interested participants in my research out of two males and one girl were the two males. The age group could be anywhere from 12 to 40, but I believe the socio-economic status groups that would buy my magazine would primarily be from the C1, C2, D and E groups. This makes sense as two of the people I interviewed, out of three aged seventeen to nineteen were unemployed. Most of the readers would be in schools, colleges and university. These groups are young with plenty of disposable income, because they are young they are likely to be heavily into music and so would find my magazine entertaining and useful for finding the next big band. Once they read my magazine they could easily be turned onto the independent music niche to create the profits I would need as the answers from question eight prove.

         I attracted my audience with many methods. I knew my magazine would need a gritty, down to earth look so I accomplished this with a hand drawn title, brick wall background and a dark colour palette running throughout the magazine pages. Question two even answers that the average reader would be able to detect a solid colour scheme when they were flicking through the pages of my hypothetical publication. I knew the audience would need some respite from this colour palette so I created contrast with very bright eye-catching pieces of colourful text on the front cover. Using Blogger allowed me to constructively collect my thoughts and create my magazine in a consistent, efficient manner. Wikipedia allowed me to find information on related companies to my genre of music magazine and the big distributers etc.

         Google was used to find examples of front covers, contents pages and double page features so I could get a rough idea of what and what not to do in terms of layout, photos and content within my own pages. In question one all three people who’ve been quizzed have admitted my driving is good. I used my own camera and college’s to take the photographs of the musicians; these were capable of taking quite high resolution photos for use via digital manipulation in programs like Photoshop and InDesign to create content for my publication. Because I had my skills with Photoshop from graphics I knew what to do when it came to getting the images I wanted for my magazine. I knew how to sharpen images and how to filter them to make them suit the theme of my publication. I think this works and this is shown by the praise from all three quiz takers.

         Looking back at my preliminary task, I can see that my skills have improved. The front cover of my preliminary task had a bad layout and the photos were of a poor resolution. The fonts on the front were bland and boring. I made sure to rectify these mistakes in my actual music magazine project with solid, easy to follow layout, high res photographs and bright, colourful fonts. I made my own font instead of using stock fonts from word and scanned it in to give my magazine the hand crafted feel I wanted. I think my project was a success, considering that magazines are made in a far bigger frame of time than a few weeks like mine had to be. I think my magazine looked good, it had good content but it may have been too niche for the average reader and so this would impact profits and a limited, narrow musical audience would buy my magazine.