Evaluation E
‘Provide an Evaluation of
the product you created for Unit 5. You may refer in your response to such
things as the suitability of your product for its intended audience, its
technical quality and its aesthetic quality’
Discuss
your product in light of the objectives outlined in your treatment.
In my treatment
I set out to inform my audience about issues that or not to do solely with
games but other things such as health /
lifestyle and bullying with girl gamers, I did this so I could come away from
the stereotypical gaming magazines that are on the market, and I wanted to
offer the real gamers audience that I targeted something new. I also succeeded
in keeping some aspects of a normal gaming magazine with a top 5 countdown of
games, this will drag in the gaming audience that I need and then hopefully
they will read into other articles that I am going to have in the product that
are not stereotypically gaming related.
A few things
that I didn’t succeed in consist of keeping the house style throughout my
magazine, the house style that I set myself was to have the main image and
masthead of the article on one page and then place the article and sub images
on the other page. The reason I did not carry this idea through was because of
the fact that it did not look like a magazine double page spread at all, it
looked more like the layout of a book, which is why I had to change the layout
to make it look more like a magazine, and also I thought that if I kept the
same layout throughout my product the audience would get bored of it and then
move on.
If my product
was a real commercial product it would probably not survive, the reason for
this being the genre of the magazine which is gaming with a bit of lifestyle
involved in it; I think this is because there is only a small amount of people
that the product could appeal to as there is only a hand full of people that
actually do both gaming and keep fit, otherwise they are complete opposite
genres, there just wouldn’t’t be a big enough following to keep the product stable and therefore
I would not generate enough sales.
The cover price
for my product was £2.00 and the total sales estimate that I set was 5,000,
when creating these sales estimates I thought that it would be a realistic
target to set myself, but when you think about it realistically there is only a
handful of people that the product could appeal to and a lot of them wont make
it an priority to go out and buy my product.
Discuss
your project’s real appeal to your target audience.
The feedback
that I received of my target audience was a mixture of both negative and
positives, which is good as it leaves my product room for improvement. An
example of things that they likes could be the stylistics of my front cover
such as the Dpad in the ‘o’ of my masthead, they said the banner was very
appealing, the font that I chose reflects the genre of the magazine which is a good thing because
then my audience would be able to gather a good idea about the genre of my
magazine just by looking at my masthead, they also complimented the branding on
my front cover as the main colour of the front cover relates to the main
article in the product, they then went on to say that my sell lines were placed
well.
They had just as many negatives about the same page as positives, they
said the main image lacks colour which I believe would be a problem if the
other colours on the page were not as eye catching, there is too much blank
space which may be a problem as my audience may not be impressed with the
amount of content in the product. There is too much green on the front cover
which again could be a problem, along with the pink the audience may get
confused at who the product is aimed at which could result in a lack of sales.
An overuse of stroke could be a bit hard on the eye, although I believe it
helps the colour stand out more and easier to read, the stoke makes the product
look to repetitive.
The negatives
that my audience addressed during the feedback stage would have to be addressed
in that I would have to change some of the elements that they picked out, these
elements will be the blank space, to fix this I will add more sell lines on my
front cover as this will give the audience an idea of the content in my product
and so they get the feel that there is a lot more in the product compared to
what there is now. The fact there is too much green on the page will have to be
addressed in that I will possibly change some of the sell lines to the
secondary colour that is on my front cover which is pink, at the same time
though because my product is primarily targeted at males I am trying to keep it
as masculine as possible which is hard with a main feature like ‘Girl Gamer’
The overuse of
stoke means that I will either have to tone it down a bit or get rid of it completely,
I would rather just tone it back a bit as I believe that the stroke allows the
colour to stand out more on the colorless background and also make the text
easier to read. I am going to add another smaller image at the bottom of the
page for another article that is featured in my product to stop the front cover
from being too repetitive.
I believe that
the product that I have created will appeal to the tribes I outlines which are
‘real gamers’, ‘nerds’ and also ‘sports junkies’ the reason I believe it would
appeal to them is because the gaming factor of the product will obviously
appeal to real gamers and nerds because stereotypically they find video games
interesting and I believe the content in my product would keep them reading,
the sports junkie tribe would be able to relate to the lifestyle aspect of the
product as I believe it has good content in it such as keeping a healthy
lifestyle while gaming which may also help them pick up a new hobby.
For the contents
page that I created there was a lot more negatives than positives, which told
me that it needed to be redone all together. An example of some of the
positives that I was given was good color scheme, I think the reason they said
this was because of the fact that the light green can be related to gaming, as
it resembles the same colour on the Xbox especially on the black background.
The other good point they made was the good stylistics on the page which is the
space invader images around the top of the page, again the reason they said this
is because they are semantically related to gaming so it allows the audience to
know what the genre of the magazine is when they turn to that page.
The
socioeconomic groups that I outlined were B, C1 and C2, the reason I believe my
product would appeal to them is because, recently gaming has become a very
expensive hobby to keep up with, such as games and consoles cost a lot of money
these days so I would have to target groups which would be able to keep up with
the magazines content financially. Another reason I targeted these groups was
because from audience research I found that the majority of my audience would
be in these groups.
With my product
I targeted both genders, especially with this issue as the main feature is
about girl gamers which means that my secondary audience could consist of
females which is quite unusual for a gaming magazine and that could relate to
my unique selling point. The main gender that I targeted was males though as
males are stereotypically more interested in video games than females.
Discuss
your projects technical weaknesses and strengths.
Photography -
There was no problems with the images that I used
although some of the images that I originally took had problems with them such
as the photos being out of focus or the model being on the wrong side of the
frame.
This example on the left from my ‘Gaming Lifestyle’ article is very
clearly out of focus which meant that I had to take the photo again many times
because I could not take the risk of all of my photos being out of focus
especially if they are the same shot.
Some of the
images from my photo shoots were poorly framed with the model either being too
far too the left or the right when they were meant to be in the middle of the
frame, this was one of the easier problems to correct as you could see straight
away on the camera if they were poorly framed so I was able to take the photos
again straight after.
Writing - For the writing in my articles I tried to keep the same narrative
voice throughout to try and keep a house style and so the audience would be
able to bond with the magazine opposed to having a different narrative voice
for example having an upbeat article and then a depressing narrative voice in
the next article, I also tried to keep the same stylistics throughout as this
again would help the audience identify this as ‘Control’ magazine. The only difference in writing was the length
of the articles that I wrote. Once that I had created my bible I had an idea of
how big the article could be because I had the layout for each article in mind.
The good moments of
writing in my product were definitely in the ‘Top 5 Greatest Games of 2013’
article as I had a lot more information to work with form when I was doing the
article research for that one, on the other hand when I was doing the article
research for the ‘Girl Gamer’ article all of the information was quite
repetitive which made the article a lot more time consuming that the other two.
For example these two double page spreads have totally different layouts
which will change the length of the article, Another factor that will change
the length is the amount of information that each article would need to be an
effective article and in this case ‘The 5 Greatest Games of 2013’ needed the
most information as I needed to include a through evaluation of every game
included.
The ‘Girl Gamer’ article on the other hand only had one aim, which was
to defeat negative stereotypes about girl gamers so once I had done enough for
to support my argument I could conclude the article and also I did not have
much room to write place the article in.
Layouts deployed - Originally
there was going to be a house style employed but I had to get rid of that idea
because I didn’t want my product to be too repetitive as I feel that my
audience would have quickly gotten bored if I had a similar layout throughout
my product. The text to image ratio that I applied at the start of the
production was correct although it did differ depending on the article, but the
text ratio was never under 50.
The way I used palettes in my product again differed on the article and
who it was primarily aimed at, the girl gamer uses a much more feminine palette
as I was trying to create this feminine effect to try and draw in a secondary
female audience. The layouts I used in
my product were generally quite busy especially with ‘The Greatest Games of
2013’ article as there wasn’t a blank spot on the page really, I feel this will
help my audience relate to it as it is a young audience and they are generally
quite upbeat and hyperactive. Also with this article I decided against using
the normal column layout and went for using boxes instead as I had to separate
everything on the page and give each game its own space for an analysis opposed
to the analyst’s clashing and the risk of the audience getting confused.
