Personal Learning and Reflection of Research Task
- 1. Personal Learning & Reflection
- 2. Front Cover Research To begin my coursework i started to look into more detail of general magazines. I found many music magazine front covers to try and give myself a wide variety of research. By analysing 10 music magazine front covers I found out the common features on a magazine but also the little individual ideas that some magazine companies include. To add variety and interest into my magazine front cover research instead of looking into the same style of magazine, I added an opera based read. This is completely different to many of the magazines i looked into, giving me some good ideas on what fonts and styles should be used for a certain type of magazine. I found out that many magazines have a large and bold heading to advertise their product and catch the readers eye. I also realised that the name is very important. I think that have a short and catchy word is overall better as this is more likely going to be remembered by the public.I also found out that many magazines have a large imagine in the centre. This is to also catch the readers eye but the picture should be of someone with interest to make more readers buy the product. This has given me some good ideas of what style and who i would like to photograph for my front cover. I aim to keep the picture well related to the style of my magazine.
- 3. Contents Research To continue further into my research I then looked into contents pages. Similar to what i did for my front covers, I gathered a wide range of contents pages to give my research variety. I also tried to find the contents pages to the magazines i had researched for the front covers to try and continue the same style. By looking into the research closely i found out that similarly to the front covers, most of the contents pages featured large pictures of interesting and famous celebrities. Although there were many ways of how the contents pages were styled i have decided to base my contents page on a simple layout. Using the magazine ‘Q’ as an example, they mainly have a large picture with little text. I also found out that the text can be limited but some magazines have decided to include introductions and paragraphs of text. By looking at a few examples, I decided that little text comes across more appealing and less ‘busy’, as most people do not want to read a lot.
- 4. Double Page Spread Research Continuing even further into my research i took a look at double page spreads out of different magazines. Researching into this area gave me a good idea of what to include inside my magazine. I found out that many of the double spread pages i researched into include a wide range of images, most of which taking up the whole page. The popular styling seems to be inserting the text on top of the images so the page is filled. Many of the pages i looked into were interviews of celebrities or advertising and talking about different bands. Overall i found out that photographs are a big part of the content, giving me a lot of ideas about featuring photographs inside my magazine. I also found out that most pages included famous celebrities so i will need to think hard about who i would like to photograph to make my magazine interesting and to attract the audience.
- 5. Questionnaire and Find your tribeAfter producing my questionnaire and showing it to my targeted audience I found out most of the key information to help me finalize and put together my magazine. By finding out my key information, for example what magazines people like, i have been able to put my ideas together and gather more of an image of what i would like my overall magazine to be styled like. I found out in my questionnaire that most people in my targeted audience enjoy reading about girl bands and rappers. This has given me some good ideas to create an original magazine related to these subject areas. The ‘Find Your Tribe’ analysis helped me to discover what type of people are in the area of my town and what type of style and person i am. This helped me to think about what kind of people are in the area and what they may want to read. Overall i feel i have made enough research to give me a secure idea of what i would like to produce as my final product. I feel happy with the outcome of my research and feel that i have found out enough information from the different area types.