Student Magazine Analysis

Below is an example of a student's magazine, a part of the ancillary task required for the Media A2 coursework collaboration. Below the image is the link to Nemi's blog where I obtained the example through www.getaheadocrmedia.blogspot.com

http://nemi-nem.blogspot.com/

The Example above is useful to me because by identifying the main strenghts and weaknesses of the magazine I can use these pro's and con's to see where perhaps I could improve and what I need to avoid doing when processing my own magazine.

The main strenghts of the poster include that the student has clearly researched magazines and has used some of the codes and convention in making her magaizne. For example through researching magazines such as Empire and TOTALFILM she has identified that they all include a date, price and barcode and she has used all 3 in the processing of her own magazine. I plan to follow these conventions as she did to improve my magazine cover.

Another strenght of the magazine is that the student has seen the impact the title has on magazine and noted their importance and has decided to really emphasise the importance in her own magazine by making the title a very large font and using a bright red font to generate a more significant impact than perhaps a small white title would.

A real negative of the magazine however is the bluriness and clear pixilation of her main image. Round the edges of the picture the editing is obviously very rough and rushed. I want to avoid this at all costs as I feel that poor editing can lead to a magazine looking un-professional or fairly scruffy.

Another negative of the magazine is the text around the image. I feel the text looks very plain and very unappealing. The text should attract you towards the magazine not put you off, which is why I have decided not to use any text around the outside of my magazine just a selling line to promote the film. I want the audience to be attracted to the picture and the selling line, I do not feel that including several chunks of text around the otuskirts of the pciture will appeal to my target audience.

In conclusion I would want my magazine to look more like the example of Empire magazine below than this cover. It may just be a difference in preference but I feel that the lesser amount of text there is the more appealing the magazine is. The magazine example below includes a very limited amount of text and focuses heavily on the image of "Legolas" and the punch line "Let the battle begin" while still following conventions such as price, date and a compulsory barcode.