Evaluation E

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.