Analysis of the Deyes school newsletter

For our prelim task, we have been asked to produce a school news letter, so in lesson we decided to look at our own school newsletter for Deyes high and analyse it. The target audience of the newsletter may be the students of Deyes, however, it is more likely to be aimed their parents, although due to the mixed content, this is slightly unclear. The colour scheme is quite effective, as they match the colours on our school badge/ logo, however, they are very bright primary colours, and this can sometimes look a bit unprofessional and have connotations of an almost childlike feel.

Also, the use of clip arts may be considered as an immature choice of imagery. Half way through the newsletter, there are some professional photographs of the drama students, and these work very well, as they promote the subject well and show that the school is professional.

The letter from the head also suits its target audience, as the use of plain black text in a formal, paragraphed layout looks more mature. However, over the middle spread of pages ('recall to central') there is a lot of text, and many people (especially the students) would be bored with reading such large amounts of text. These pages are clearly aimed at parents, but even parents could potentially be bored with this.

The pages that include 'numeracy top tips' and 'puzzle time' are clearly aimed at the students, but, with their use of clip arts such as mickey mouse, the students may feel a bit patronised, as mickey mouse is clearly associated with younger children. Overall this newsletter is clearly not produced by professionals, and has a mixed target audience, which is made obvious by their use of formal and informal content.

Questionnaires

For my research into music magazines, I have decided to create a questionnaire which will allow me to identify my target audience and also indicate things that I need to consider when creating my own magazine. To create the questionnaire, I used Google docs (which is from the same family as Google Blogger), and this allowed me to share it on the Internet, which today may prove very effective as most people now have access to a computer. This means that I can get a lot of results easily and quickly. With the results I will be able to have a view into what people think about music magazines such as how much they are willing to pay for it, what sections of a magazine they are most interested in etc - these things will be necessary considerations when it comes to designing my own. I decided to have a maximum of 6 questions to a page, as from previous experience from filling out questionnaires myself, I find that too many qiestions to a page may put people off from continuing to fill out the rest of the form. Below is the link to my music questionnaire, please fill it out if you have time, as it only takes a minute to complete, thank you.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFNpNFhhU0dWVzQ5UEQ5SlVXMmZselE6MQ#gid=0

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs. A sign is something that stands for something, other than itself.

There are two main approaches to semiotics;

 - the Ferdinand de Saussure approach (1857-1913)

 - or the Charles Sander Pierce approach (1839-1914)

The first, is based on a study by Saussure - Sausuure's dyadic semiotic system. He concluded that signs are purely psychological and that they only make sense in a formal abstract system. He also stated that a one word language is an impossibility, and that a sign refers to what it is not. A sign is made up of a signifier, which signifies the signified - basically, something which connotes something else.

The other is Pierce's tryadic semiotic system, which states that there are 3 main different types of sign; indexes, icons and symbols. With indexes, the signifier is not arbitrary, but is connected to the signified in some way, either physically or casually (eg. the smell of smoke signifies a fire, but does not necessarily indicate a fire). An icon means that the signifier resembles the signified, for example a painting of a tree resembles a tree, but is not a tree itself, and a symbol is when the signifier is totally arbitrary and conventional, such as letters and numbers.

When making my magazine, I will have to consider the semiotics within it very carefully, in order to attract my target audience. I will take into consideration the colours I use for fonts and backgrounds, the images I use, and even the mise en scene within my photographs, as the wrong use of these things could have a poor end result - if my magazine was of the thrash metal genre, I would not use a pink and purple colour scheme to attract my hard core rock fans! I will have to keep my audience in mind, and use semiotics to ensure that my target audience would be attracted.



Photoshop Editing

Due to the fact that we will need to use photoshop to edit photographs for our music magazine, during our lesson, we had a go at using some of the editing tools to crop photos, increase/ decrease the contrast/ brightness, and use the spot heal and clone stamp tools. Below are some examples of the originals and the edits.

As you can see, I used the crop tool to crop this image to get rid of unwanted and unnecessary background - this edit allowed me to make the image more focused to the object (in this case the planes).

For this photograph, I decreased the colour curves, which decreased the brightness of the image ( the top is the edit of the original below it).

On this photograph I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select the area in the mirror, and then I selected the inverse and turned that black and white. This is a colour burst technique.

On this image, I used the spot healing tool to erase the spots off of the Dalmatian's face and shoulders.

For this photograph I used the clone stamp to take a section of the background and print it in front of the bottles. To make this look more realistic, I had to take sections of the background from a variety of different places.

Overall, these photoshop lessons were very helpful, as these techniques will be necessary in order for our magazine to look professional. I found the clone stamping the most difficult, as it was hard to get the background not to look fake, but when it's done really well it is a very effective editing technique which will potentially be used in the production of my music magazine. Also, I think that the spot healing will be very useful in editing the shots that I need to take of 'bands', as airbrushing is very common in the magazine industry in general, in order to make them look flawless.

Mock ups and conventions

In lesson we looked at several different examples of magazines. We looked at the layout of them, and created mock ups to help us notice some similarities that were common over all genres of magazine. I looked at an issue of the film magazine 'Empire' and the technology magazine 'Stuff'.

This is a mock up from a hobbit edition of Empire - it featured a main image of Bilbo and Golem, which clearly linked to the main article within this issue of the magazine. All text was in capitals and even the text in the plug was in capitals. Obviously the typical conventions of every magazine, including a bar code and a mast head were main features on the cover, and a colour scheme of black, gold for the mast head, red for the main title and white for tag lines and cover lines made sure that this issue was specified as being a special edition (the denotations of gold and red both have connotations of importance and ensure that the reader know that the Hobbit edition is a special one). This was very effective for this issue, as the Hobbit is a very popular franchise, and this cover will draw in many fans mainly through the effective use of imagery. We can see that Empire is a very popular magazine, as the image overlays the masthead - this shows that it is so well known, that it does not even need to be fully visible for it to be recognisable.

This mock up is of an issue of 'Stuff' magazine. Again, the masthead, although large is over layed with the image of a woman and the man, which shows it is also very recognisble and well known. A more simple colour scheme is used on this cover, with only red, black and white being used draws more attention to the images that have been used. This magazine is definitely aimed at men - the main image of a woman holding a piece of technology definitely would attract a man, and in this case, the use of the woman is very effective.

Music magazine research

I decided to do some initial research into music magazines. There are many different genres of music, therefore there are many different genres of music magazines, so has provided me with an array of different magazines to look at.

This is an example of a cover from NME - a music magazine which primarily focuses on the indie music genre. Personally, this is my favourite music genre. As you can see, this magazine tends to have a central image (in this issue, of 'The Last Shadow Puppets' Alex Turner and Miles Kane) surrounded by text. A simple colour sheme of red, white and black is used, and it is very effective, as it clearly seperates the titles from the subtitles etc. The colour scheme also contrasts, but also compliments the background image, so it draws the cover together very well as a whole. A small bit of yellow is also used in the plug, which is effective, as it stands out from the rest of the text.

This is a cover from Kerrang! music magazine. This magazine is more based around heavier rock music than NME, featuring bands/artists such as Metallica, Biffy Cliro and American alternative rock bands such as You Me At Six and My Chemical Romance. In contrast to the NME magazine, Kerrang! has several other smaller images which accompany the main image.

 

Rolling Stone is a very mixed bag, with many features from various genres - the first image featuring more pop type artists such as Lana Del Ray, Lady Gaga and Azelia Banks, and the second featuring an article on Pink Floyd and The White Stripes, two very famous rock bands. Obviously, some music magazines are successful without having a definite genre. Again, similar to NME Rolling Stone features a singular image surrounded by text.

Vibe magazine on the other hand has a very clear genre - R&B and rap music. This cover features Kanye West, a very famous rap artist. Like Rolling Stone and NME, this magazine has a single, central image.

Introduction

For our AS media coursework we have been given a brief which has several tasks for us to complete. By the end of the course, we will have produced; a prelim task (School/college newsletter) and a main task - to produce the front cover, contents page and a double page spread for a music magazine. All of our work has to be original, including text and photographs, which we will have to take ourselves (they can not be just from Google images!!).