AS Reflection

How it went: Throughout my year I progressed a lot in terms of skills on Research, Planning and Analysis, including softwares like Photoshop. I feel like alongside studying Graphics, I was able to further my designs and this is the reason I want to carry on print production in A2. I loved the process of designing and tweaking my designs until I was happy with the final outcome.

Strengths: I feel my design itself was very strong, but looking back now, I think I would of been able to improve it. However, my evaluation was very detailed, and hope to carry on these skills in A2.

Weaknesses: Certain weaknesses may be time management with my evaluation questions. Although they were detailed I did not leave myself with a lot of time to complete them.

Plans for A2: Because of this weakness, I feel it is very necessary to stay on top of the evaluation questions, and get my research, planning and designing done in good time. I will keep a schedule and stay organized, so that I can be as productive and efficient as possible. Hopefully, I keep up the effort and achieve an A in my coursework, the same as last year.

Pitch

Over the course of the academic year, my A2 coursework for Media Studies requires me to make a regional magazine (this includes a front cover, contents page and double page spread), a website and a billboard. The genre of my magazine will be lifestyle and fashion from the surrounding areas (Sunderland, Newcastle and Durham). I know there are already certain magazines such as Crack and Spark, that offer information on the latest gigs, and trends etc, but feel like there is space in the market for mine, which will solely concentrate on females interests in the North East. Therefore, I may find my primary audience being mainly girls.

Proposal

I intend to create a magazine for my main task, and as it needs to be regional, I am going to go down the route of fashion, makeup and girly interests in the North East, similar to Spark Magazine and Fuse Magazine in Sunderland, and Crack Magazine from Newcastle.

As for my ancillary tasks, I have chosen both the website pages and billboard advertisement to create.  I feel like these two tasks play to my strengths in print design and I will be able to create them at a much better standard compared to AS. Initial ideas include a website with lots of different categories about my chosen topic, and then perhaps the billboard advertising a fashion show.

A2 Brief

The brief for my A2 coursework is to create the first four pages from an original regional magazine, together with the following:
- two hyperlinked pages from magazine's website;
- a billboard advertisement for the magazine.

Welcome

Welcome to my A2 Media Studies Blog. Here I will complete the coursework set for me within the A2 element of my Media Studies course. This will include research, planning, designing and analysis for my regional magazine.