Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog!

My name is Oliver and I am a student at Deyes High School studying Media Studies.  Over the next 6 months or so I will be updating this blog with my progress on my coursework and the related research.  The aim of this blog is to clearly show my progress in a diary-like style to show the different stages of work done during my coursework.  I hope as the posts go on, my personal development will become clear.

What is my brief?
The brief that I have been given has been split up into two tasks; one smaller task and one larger one. The smaller task is the preliminary task which will involve designing and creating the front page of a school newsletter the audience of which is the students attending the school and their parents. The front cover must contain an original medium close up (MCU) image.

The other task is the main task which involves designing and creating the front cover, contents page and a double page spread for an original music magazine. I have to take several music related photographs to use on each page.

In order to design each of the tasks successfully I will need to carry out both primary and secondary research so that I am able to get a feel for the target market and so that i can design magazines with features and styles that people who will buy the magazine will want.  The first part of my primary research is a questionnaire that I designed about music magazines.  It can be viewed here and the results will follow shortly.

UPDATE: The results from my questionnaire can be viewed here.

What are your intentions?
I intend to start by doing primary and secondary research into the music magazine market.  I will try to figure out what the people who buy music magazines want from music magazines, the reasons for why some  people do not buy music magazines and what would possibly persuade them to do so.  Once I have completed both my primary and secondary research, I will be able to analyse the data that I will have collected to see what the view of my target market are.

With the results of this analysis, I will be able to get a good picture of how I feel I need to design my magazine in order to please the people who will be buying it.

What are you intending to do first?
The first step that I plan to take is to start my primary research and create a questionnaire which can be complete easily online.  The questionnaire will contain two different sets of questions; one set for people who do read music magazines and another set for people who do not.  As I will be doing it online, the results from the questionnaire will be automatically to a spreadsheet which I can view as raw data or in graph form to make better sense of the information.


What are you going to do for your research?
As mentioned above, my primary research will involve creating a questionnaire with two different sets of questions; one set for people who read music magazines and one set for people who don't.  I will the collate the data an analyse the results to make guidelines for creating my magazine.  As for my secondary research, to complete that I will analyse the magazine covers and articles of current music magazines so see how they have used different techniques to represent different things and to show different ideologies.