Evaluation: How does your media product represent particular social groups

  The target audience that I have aimed my whole magazine at is the teenage Indie Rock scene. These are fans that would be interested in this type of music and would like to read about the famous bands involved within the magazine. I have represented them in a stereotypical way by creating the house style of black whites and blues. These dark colours represent the dark heavy music that may be played by Rock fans. Using these colours, I feel that it dominates over all of the other competitors just like the targeted audience as they like to stand out of the crowd and fall into the category of rebellions.

   The first image I have used on my front cover appeals to the target audience as it is in black and white. I edited this image using Photoshop and put the gradient effect to fit in with the target audience as the typical colours usually consist of the black and white. The gradient effect will give the harsh and grudged look. The image also sees that the model is holding an electric guitar that the audience could potentially win. This would relate to the target audience as if they were to know that an upcoming star was to hold this guitar then it would be more profitable. Electric guitars are known for creating Indie Rock music, so this would persuade the audience to try to win this guitar to play or just to keep for the music.

   The language I have used throughout the magazine has been informal and chatty. I think that the target audience- teenagers would be more interested in a magazine with this type of language as they can understand it much more and gives them a break to the intelligent formal language that they are seeing on an everyday basis. Especially in the double page spread, the interview has tended to be quite informal and not taken so seriously.

   The ratio of pictures to text are quite even. I used a few pictures to break up the large bits of text especially for the double page spread as this is where I had quite large block of texts. However by using the images in these pages it didn’t look so much to read. For the front cover and contents page i used one big image to cover the background so that you could concentrate on both text and images as they take up the same size of space. I think this would relate to my target audience especially as teenagers dislike the idea of reading a block of text as it seems to them like it goes on forever. By adding images between the text, the reader has a chance to pause to look at the image also.