Evaluation of School Magazine

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

I believe that my school magazine follows the codes and conventions of a successful school magazine in a way that is effective. While producing my front cover i followed the codes and conventions very strictly, and did not deviate from them in any way. This is also the same for my contents page however i did use a larger font size for the text included on the page. This i will consider when producing my music magazine. Also when producing my contents page i did not have my double page spread image much larger than the other inserts included on the page.

The central image i used for my school magazine shows the student looking directly at the reader, this technique is called direct mode of address, it is used to make the reader feel that the character is trying to influence the reader to buy the product. This technique i will consider using again when producing my music magazine.

How did you use new media technologies in the construction of your media product?

To create my front cover i used adobe photoshop, although the software is hard to navigate it produces the best final product for the task needed to be completed. This is because it has a wider range of colour schemes, text styles and it also has photo editing software. This is why quarke express would not be suitable when producing a front cover.

However Quark express is perfect when designing a contents page, because it allows you to set the layout in to columns which is part of the codes and conventions when creating a contents page. Therefore i will be using quark express to produce my contents page and double page spread of my music magazine because it allows you to set the text in a way that is sufficient.

What are the strength and weaknesses of both the product and your use of new media technologies?

I believe my front cover contains a few strengths as it includes a good central image, which accomadates what the briefing states, that it should be a medium close up of a student. I am also happy with my central image as i used adobe photoshop to produce the final image including two seperate images.

However my front cover does not include a sufficient number of tag lines, and that the colour of the text makes it hard to read. I am also dissappointed with the positioning statement which i have used 'Your way to get an A' this is because it suggests it is all about school work, although the product i wanted to produce was also about other non education based subjects such as Ice radio.

The software i used to produce both my contents page and front cover i was very inexperienced on them and was not familar with all the tools. So therefore my product may have aspects which are not great but this would be due to the lake of experience of the softwares (adobe photoshop and quark express).