AS Foundation Media: January 2015

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

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Evaluation Question Two...

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I have aimed my music magazine at 16-24 year olds, predominantly females. The genre of my magazine is indie/alternative, therefor meaning that people interested in this style of music would be interested in my magazine. For example my magazine wouldn't appeal to people interested in classical music, as my magazine doesn't contain this genre of music.
My audience will decode the information given to them to differentiate between different stereotypes and information within my magazine.

My main image on my front cover is of my main feature artist - a 17 year old female. This independently suggests that my magazine has more of a representative of females rather than males. Her pose is strong and she has a neutral yet serious expression on her face, whilst looking directly into the camera - therefor representing strong and independent individuals and most likely females as they would feel as though they can relate more similarly to a person of the same sex as their self. Many females on magazine front covers are sexualised and objectified in a discriminating way. I have chosen not to represent my artist in this way as I am aiming RUSH mainly at females and I don't think that they would approve of their gender to be shown in this way. This is the reason why I have depicted my cover artist as strong, independent and fierce for the first impression as it goes against the social expectations that women are weak.
In comparison to this, I have shown my artist as cheeky and fun on my double page spread. This different persona represents a whole different group of individuals, such as people who are fun-loving, and have a more positive outlook on life.

Using the female character combined with my spot colour of pastel pink on my front cover relates to the stereotypical female gender, which therefor relates my whole magazine to this gender, as the front cover is the first impression people will get from my magazine. Pink connotes youth, love and the female gender making it ideal to use throughout my magazine as it represents the female gender significantly.

My use of sans-serif fonts throughout my magazine indicates youth - compared to serif typefaces that are generally used more in publications aimed towards a higher age group due to typewriters and books using this's style of font. Understanding that my sans-serif font connotes a more youthful look, means that my magazine will appeal to a younger generation more than over 30s', as the youth of today are often on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter that predominantly use sans-serif fonts throughout, making it a common convention of the modern publishing world.
Continuing with my use of font, I have used a messy handwriting style font for my main cover line off the front cover of my magazine. As this is one of the main viewpoints for my front cover I have chosen the particular font as it relates to casual individuals and teenagers as many of them could identify the font as similar to their own handwriting.

On my double page spread my interview has been written in an informal and casual way. This helps to represent the younger generation as the questions and responses have both been written by a 17 year old girl - this being the same age as my target market. Teenagers and young adults will be able to relate to this as it would be similar to how they speak in day to day life, whereas if an articulate adult was reading this, they may think it seems far too informal and maybe even sloppy.

My cover lines also represent the indie genre bye including indie bands such as Alt-J and The Kooks. People who are interested in these bands will recognise this and be drawn towards my magazine. This is continued throughout my front cover and contents page.

Including social buttons into my magazine opens up the possibility of viewing information from my magazine online and on your phone. This represents predominately the younger generation, as teenagers are often using their phone to socialise and share information, whereas the majority of adults were not brought up with this unlimited access to technologies and social media, meaning that they don't use them often, and so this feature in my magazine would not appeal to them.