The student has learned a lot about magazine design and photo editing software from creating their music magazine project. They used Photoshop to manipulate photos to make them more realistic and representative of professional music magazines. Through this process, the student improved their Photoshop skills and understanding of the effort required to produce a polished magazine product. They also learned the importance of carefully planning images, layouts, and details to effectively target their audience and represent their brand. Comparing their initial school magazine to the music magazine shows development in selecting appropriate fonts, layouts, and high production quality images.

1. Alex Kingham Media AS

2. In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? When starting this project I looked at magazines ‘Billboard’ and ‘NME’. These have been big influences in my own work. Keeping a foundation on the genres of music Magazines, I along with my group developed our own. Therefore some of the forms and conventions I have used have come from those as well as others. On my front cover I used a dominant central image and a large a large masthead. This is a common convention used by many mainstream magazines. This is used to grab the attention of potential readers. ‘ Muzik’ also has extra images on the front cover to show other content in the magazine its self. This is also a popular convention within mainstream products as it helps to provide a snap shot of the entire publication of the cover to give the audience a glimpse of the product with out them having to pick it up and flick through the pages. Conventions of a front cover include a large masthead and one large eye-catching photograph. Other convention that I have included are; that the double page spread should include a large, bold heading and different size photographs. The overall image of the artists is positive in order to promote their music. He comes across as a very down to earth person which is appealing to the audience. The appearance of the featured artist is dominant in the magazines representation; he is very casual looking, which helps to convey the message of casual reading for casual music fans.

9. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? Part 1 During the production of this coursework the main problem that I and the rest of my group had was the pictures. As the brief that we have been given to create this magazine meant that we had to take all the pictures ourselves. We soon agreed that we would have to star in the magazines as we didn’t think we would be able to book a photo shoot with real pop stars. This was a problem as it was going to be hard to find locations and costumes to make it seem as if we were pop stars. I over came this obstacle in a number of ways. To put this magazine together I used Photoshop, this meant that I could manipulate and alter my pictures to make them more believable. For example on the double page spread, the London picture is made up of thee elements, the picture of Tower Bridge, a picture of my friend Josh then thirdly the guitar and strap as we did not have this at the time when we needed it. There was also a similar situation with the front cover, the chair that you see was not the one that he was sitting on when the photo was originally taken, I cut him out then put him onto this more stylish chair then added the two toned backdrop. Then another problem was presented to me, he just didn’t look old enough. This was easily solved by adding on with Photoshop a beard and moustache; this helped not only by making him look older but it made him loo far more rock and roll.