Evaluation

Audience Feedback
I asked some people from my target audience so assess my final product, and these are their responses:
"I really like this magazine. It looks like a typical Rave magazine, but
it also looks different from all the rest too. The colours are really bright and eye-catching, and the feature is very professional. However, I think the images could be better and the layout could be better thought-out."
Heather, aged 19

"Wow, that's colourful! You couldn't miss that a mile off! I love the title for the feature; what a great play on words! I also love the images; they are really well choreographed. I think there should be a wider range of images, but other than that, I think it looks amazing!"
Alex, aged 21

"I'm not really a fan of Rave music; I find it repetitive and annoying. But if I saw this on the shelf in Tesco's, it would definitely catch my attention. Having said that, I think that if I did this coursework, I would have researched more into the genre of Rave. I don’t' think this candidate has, and if she has, I don't think it shows very well; it seems just a bit stereotypical to me."
Tara, aged 17

"Because I am a Graphics student, I don't think this candidate has used Adobe InDesign to its full potential; there's a lot of cool tools that they could have used to make this magazine better. I understand that they had never used the program until now, but I think that they could have used some time after school to familiarise themselves with it. Having said that, I really do like the magazine they have made; I love the colour scheme (who knew that black, white, hot pink and lime green worked well together!) and the props and costume are awesome!"
Chris, aged 18

Similarity to Other Magazines
In terms of colour scheme, I think that using bright colours like green and pink against equally striking colours like black and white is very much like MixMag – they are known for their bright blue, purple and pink against white.
However, unlike the magazines I have researched, I have chosen to place the other bands featured in the magazine at the bottom of the front cover, whereas on DJ Magazine and MixMag, it has been placed in the bottom left corner so that when a magazine is stacked on a shelf, this is in full view, attracting the audience to buy it.

Representing the Target Market
I think that I have a represented the target market of my magazine quite well. I chose to use pink as well as green in my colour scheme so that it could appeal to the female market as well as the male market.
However, I feel that the main article appeals more to females rather than males, considering the fact that the cover star is a female and the article mentions her being a girl. This means that males might not be as interested in the magazine as females, but I feel that Rave is genre in which looks and gender do not matter to the audience; from what I gather, the actual music seems to be more important.

Existing Magazines
As I have mentioned in my research, both DJ Magazine and MixMag are very similar to the type of magazine I have made, but these magazines are more general than my magazine, and they tend to focus on different branches of the Rave genre so that they appeal to a greater audience. However, my magazine is a bit focused, which means that it will not have such a large audience.
I think that Development Hell would probably produce my magazine because it is similar to MixMag. They completely changed MixMag in 2005; they improved the production of it and made it less of a niche and more appealing to females and to a younger audience. I think that they would like the freshness and brightness of my magazine and would want to add it to their repertoire.

Audience
I decided that my audience would be both males and females ranging from the age of 16 – 25 who are interested in Rave/Disco music. I think that I have addressed this audience well by using colours that both genders would appreciate and by making my magazine look at youthful as possible without looking too youthful.
Also, I have tired to appeal to the age bracket by offering a free CD with the magazine. I decided to do this for two reasons; firstly, most of the people that would buy this sort of magazine would be students, so they would appreciate a free CD so they didn't have to download it off iTunes and spend money. Secondly, offering a free gift is a very good way of enticing people to buy any magazine, and seeing as Rave magazines tend to be more focused on the music than celebrities, I thought that a free CD would be a good idea.

What have I learnt?
From this project, I have learnt a lot more about Adobe programs. Before I started, I had only used Photoshop a few times and I have never even used InDesign before. However, now I feel like I can use both these programs by myself with some amount of confidence, which will help me in other projects I will do next year.
Also, I have learnt that with a project like this, time management is very important. Although there were some issues that occurred that were beyond my control like illness, I feel that my time could have been utilised much more efficiently in this project. If I were to make this magazine again, I would have used my spare time to make components at home and use my time at school to put them together on InDesign because this program was unavailable to home.

Preliminary Task
Compared to my preliminary task – which was to design a magazine for the school – my music magazine is a vast improvement. For my school magazine, I used Corel Paint Shop Pro X for everything, which is a very basic version of Adobe Photoshop. Using such an amateur program meant that the overall look of the magazine was not as good as it would have been if I had used the Adobe Package.
In addition, I feel that with my music magazine, I have considered the target audience more compared to my school magazine project. Before, I decided on things that I would want to see in a magazine, not what my target audience wanted. However, in this project, I have made sure that everything I did suited the target audience while still thinking about the aesthetics of the magazine.