Creative Critical Reflection

Creative Critical Reflection

Final Submission

3rd Quarter Revisions

After hearing feedback from my peers, I made some touch ups in my magazine setup and layout. One suggestion I got was to add more people into my magazine to make it seem more consumer friendly. I took this suggestion and decided to do a photo shoot with some of my family members. These photos turned out well and I chose three or four I thought would look good in my TOC and article pages. I then took two of these photos and placed one in the TOC, including a new reference to the feature article it relates to, and one on the second article page instead of some less relevant photos. Another critique I took note of was having the photos on my article pages not centered with the article columns. I readjusted the layout of the article, the second page specifically, so that these photos were in alignment with the text. This followed a more conventional pattern and made the layout look more professional overall. After making these changes,  decided that I liked the new design. It looks much more professional now and also more consumer friendly since the inclusion of other people in magazine photos makes the article topics seem more relatable and feasible.

3rd Quarter Submission Feedback

   After presenting my quarter 3 submission, I got some very valuable feedback from my peers and teacher. One suggestion they made was to maybe adjust the layout of the pictures on page 2 of my article. This would make the photos centered with my column rather than skewed as I have them now. I might look into changing this and comparing the two layouts. If I do end up changing it, I will add this change to my use of conventions post since it would be more conventional for my to change the pictures to centered with my column. Currently, my use of skewed photo positioning is less conventional and my partner has the same off-centered technique I utilized.
   Another critique I was given was to add more photos of people into my article page and maybe even to my cover page. I think I will use this advice and borrow a nice camera from my teacher and take nice, high quality photos of some of my friends to incorporate in my issue. This would make the articles seem more relatable to readers to they can view other people doing the same crafts they might be inclined to try. It would also increase the variety of photos featured in my magazine since the majority right now are all of objects and food I wrote my feature article able and relating to the titles of some of the articles in my TOC.
  A final piece of feedback I was given was that the layout of my draft pages were all very colorful and organized in their layout. I will try to even improve on this aspect of my issue by adjusting the positioning of my article photos and any other photos I add to my draft. I will also do any adjustment necessary to improve the professionalism and organization of my magazine. Overall, the main changes I will implement into my final submission will be slightly adjusting the layout of my article pages, increasing the amount of photos of people throughout my issue, and improving the professionalism of my magazine.

3rd Quarter Submission

     For my final draft submission, I made a variety of changes to improve the professionalism, visual quality, and organization of my magazine issue. My first revision was editing the captions on the cover page to fill the empty space and make the title page more intriguing to consumers. This allows readers to immediately know what the topics of the articles are in the magazine. I also changed the title page to a more bold, professional font that will pair well with any cover page design. My final revision was to add branding to the bottom of our pages. It includes the issue date (month and year), magazine title, and page number. This allows readers to be able to see which issue the magazine is on any page of the product.

CCR Draft #4

   Throughout our project, we utilized various forms of technology and computer programming such as Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Word, Photoshop, editing in the iPhone 7 photos application, and research through Google Chrome. In Microsoft Publisher, we designed and laid out our cover page, TOC, and article page drafts. This software allowed us to edit the positioning, font styles, and overall layout of each page. In Microsoft Word, I setup my flat plan. This software allowed me to type in various text boxes and relocated the different titles or page labels within the flat plan. The software also allowed me to stay more organized than other methods.
   In Photoshop, we both used this app to not only edit the quality of our photos, but also start the beginning drafts of our cover pages, TOC's, and article pages before starting the next draft in Publisher. This method allowed us to professionally alter out photos and repeatedly readjust our beginning drafts. In the iPhone 7 photo application, we used simple photo editing techniques to increase the saturation and contrast in numerous photos to make them stand out more and look more visually appealing.
   Finally, in Google Chrome, we both used this search engine to perform extensive research and learn as much as we could about magazine layout, production, and distribution. This helped us do the best we could in all aspects of the project, especially distribution, which neither of us had much experience in. Overall, the assistance of technology incorporated in various aspects of the project helped us create an exceptional product.

CCR Draft #3

Throughout the creation of this product, both my partner and I improved our design skills, writing abilities, but most importantly our production skills. This was through lots of research about our genre topic and different production and distribution methods used by magazines similar to ours. Additionally, we both improved in our techniques used in creating the overall design of our cover page, table of contents, articles, and instructional sections within the articles. For example, after research of magazine companies such as Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and HGTV Magazine, we discovered that the majority of their cover page designs used features such as having a professional font for their title, using different solid colored shapes behind their text captions to allow the text to stand out more. They also decided to utilize a cover photo that a central focal point that easily attracts viewers. Bright colors were also used to make the title page more appealing and eye catching. We incorporated all of these techniques in our title page and throughout our TOC and articles pages. In addition to research of similar products to our project, we were able to develop our production skills through trial and error, testing what we though looked the best, what didn't work, and how to fix it to make it look better or more professional. This was done a lot on our cover pages as we changed our cover photos, the color and font of our title name, article captions, and the layout of those captions as well. Overall, the use of extensive, educational research and trial and error allowed us not only to perfect the look of our cover pages, TOC's, and article pages but also to improve our production skills in this project area.

CCR Draft #2

     Our magazine is able to connect our target audience because it features a variety of articles that are enjoyable for artists of all skill levels. This means that regardless of one's experience in crafting, cooking, or gardening they should be able to understand the article or at least be interested in the topics. Additionally, we plan to create numerous social media pages. This will allow consumers to stay up to date with out project ideas and even allow them to further understand the crafting ideas. We could use websites such as Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube to create videos or step-by-step instructions to further explain our popular article topics. Also, the use of social media will allow users to be further exposed to our product and cause them to be more interested in our magazine. This will increase revenue.
     Some methods we could use for distribution of real paper products would be through mailing directly to subscribers' homes or on the shelf in various grocery stores and other shops. Additionally, working hard to increase the appeal of articles and photos featured on the cover pages of our products would attract more new customers and increase our number of subscribers. This would not only increase revenue overall, but also allow us to see what types of cover photos and article topics attract the most amount of consumers and which ones don't. Overall, our use of social media and intriguing article topics should attract and connect to the most consumers in our target audience.

CCR Draft #1

For our magazine project, we didn't originally intend to represent a certain social group or issue. We originally wanted to just create a fun-filled product that anyone could enjoy. However, we did end up creating a product that attracts a couple different groups of people. One of these types of consumers is artists, chefs, and gardeners who have a passion for the topics featured in our magazine. Our theme focuses mainly on creative home ideas, therefore angled towards people who enjoy that topic and are knowledgeable about the theme. Additionally, people who have time to enjoy our magazine are another audience group for our magazine. Therefore, another social group represented in our magazine is people who work from home or spend the majority of their day at home. Since there is a variety of projects and articles in our magazines that are about DIY crafting ideas, anyone who wants to pursue the suggestions in the articles should probably have enough time to do so. Many people who have a job that allows them to work at home, are full time parents, or are retired and have plenty of free time to do fun crafting ideas are the main type of people we consider our target audience. A final group of people we consider main consumers of our product are people who may not have experience with arts and crafts, cooking, or landscape decor but want to practice and learn more about it. Our magazine is great for this since we have a variety of types of crafting ideas throughout our magazine, many that are very simple and easy to understand. This means they are great for beginners or people of any skill-set. Overall, our magazine represents and targets a few different social groups, the main ones being people with a passion for our magazine theme, people with the time and effort to pursue arts and crafts, or anyone who wants to learn more through the articles in our magazine.

Distribution Research - Better Homes and Gardens

For this magazine's website main page, it has a similar theme and setup to Good Housekeeping and HGTV's websites as well. It has the same structure of having different layered sections containing different themes such as gardening, cooking, fashion, or celebrity gossip. For this magazine, however, it features much more cooking-related content such as easy home-cooked meals, different dessert recipes, and fun party snacks. The top of the page has a link with a large picture to a new page primarily featuring family craft and cooking ideas. Farther down, it has another section of popular dinner recipes, a section for personal fitness and yoga, another link to a page mainly about pasta dishes, and some other smaller featured pages about beauty products to keep with you at work, more lunch ideas, and home cleaning hacks. Overall, it contains a lot of cooking and food related articles but also features some stories about personal health, family, fashion, and beauty. This suggests that this company is aiming towards a target audience that enjoys cooking and spending time at home with family. It is also probably aiming towards an older age group since there is less celebrity and millennial-themed articles. Additionally, they are most likely angling towards a female audience since many of the fashion, fitness, and beauty articles were for women. Overall, it seems they have a pretty similar target audience as our magazine, but slightly different since we are more crafting based and most likely aiming towards a younger audience.

Distribution Research - Good Housekeeping

For this magazine, it features many different links on their website's homepage. These include large photos for their most popular articles, groups of links to smaller, similar articles, and tab options to switch between pages to view more content. The first articles to be featured are in a group and generally focus on fashion, celebrities, or shopping. Further down the page it displays larger photos about recent popular events which makes consumers want to click on the link to that page. There are three or four of their larger article links before another group of smaller articles. This next sections mainly features stories about news in the royal family. There is also another smaller section beneath that about movies, actors, and celebrity drama. Overall, the set-up and choice of articles to be featured on the main page show that this magazine is trying to project its product towards a certain audience. They are most likely aiming to attract female consumers who enjoy celebrity gossip and are probably home owners who would appreciate articles about home decor. Additionally, they may be trying to reach a target audience of millennials and people who would enjoy an easily to use and accessible website.

Distribution Research - HGTV

For HGTV magazine, its website initially features a couple main articles with bright, colorful photos. The overall theme of these articles is about home decorating and home improvements. This means that the majority of their consumers are homeowners or people who would enjoy using modern gadgets and techniques to improve the decor of their home. As you scroll down the page, there are also some articles mainly based on gardening and plants. These articles seem so be both educational and also just for fun, since some are about easy ideas to improve your landscape or garden. This means that another large group of their audience is crafty and handy with landscaping and the outdoors. As you continue moving down the page, you can also find a section of recent popular videos. This means that they may also be aiming their product towards a younger group who enjoy watching videos online rather than spending the time to read an article. Finally, at the very bottom of the page, they have a text box area that says, "Follow Us", with links to multiple social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. This also makes the company more accessible to millennials or anyone who normally uses social media or the internet.

Distribution Research - Traditional

For a traditional magazine, most would use methods such as displaying their product in stores, through online ads, through emails, social media, and other techniques. One example of a good distribution model is the company Hearst which includes popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping, two products that have similar themes and target audiences to our magazine. This company uses techniques like advertising their product in popular grocery stores such as Publix and Target to increase their distribution rate. Additionally, their use a wide variety of online and digital distributions methods such as advertising through social media, on their websites, and through emailing lists. These techniques not only advertise their product but attract millennials and other technologically attracted consumers to their online product. There has been an overall decrease in the amount of revenue gained from paper products like hard copies of magazines or newspapers. Therefore, many companies have turned to the Internet as a more productive method of gaining consumers. Overall, using techniques such as using websites, social media, and emailing for distribution and as ways to increase circulation will be methods utilized in our product.

Revisions - Photo Shoot Planning

To improve the content in my article, I want to add some better pictures and more photos with people in them. However, to do this I need to use a good camera for good photo quality. Within the next couple days, my new iPhone 7 should be coming in so I am waiting for that so I can use its camera for the photo shoot. I should also upload the revised photos on the article and TOC pages within the next week.

Super Bowl Commercials

The first commercial we evaluated was an advertisement for the NFL. This commercial featured persuasive techniques such as humor, well-known celebrities, and popular music. Also, it was most likely geared towards somewhat older people in their 30's, female viewers, and millennials who use use social media. The next advertisement we watched was for the upcoming Olympics. It included athletic celebrities, music geared towards empowered women, and photos of the athlete as children to trigger nostalgia. It was probably meant for millennials, parents with kids, and athletes with similar interests. The final commercial we saw was a Tide commercial. It used humor and celebrities to intrigue their audience. It was also aimed towards millennials who are the majority of viewers of TV shows with the celebrities in them. Overall, most of them utilized humor and celebrities to promote their product and make the most of their minute long advertisement.

Revisions - Branding

To add more professionalism to our magazine, we decided to add branding to the bottom of our pages. It includes the issue date (month and year), magazine title, and page number. This allows readers to be able to see which issue the magazine is on any page of the product. Below shows the edited branding in the new draft:

              TOC                                           Article Page 1                         Article Page 2

        

Revisions - Cover Page

Initially, I began editing the captions and advertisements on the cover page to fill the empty space and make the title page more intriguing to consumers. Below is the before and after of the cover page. I added larger, more colorful fonts to the captions and added more eye-catching text boxes to make them stand out. This allows readers to immediately know what the topics of the articles are in the magazine, hopefully persuading them to purchase our product. We also decided to change the title page to a more bold, professional font. Although we originally wanted a font that matched the theme of artsy, crafty designs, we realized that the rest of the magazine, pictures, and other text can show that theme while the title should be more professional and constant since it will remain the same for all other issues of our product.

Before                                     After

Target Audience Research - HGTV

For this magazine, it contains a similar theme to the theme of our magazine. It describes creative ideas for home crafts and easy home decor. Additionally, it was found that the majority of consumers were female (approximately 60%). It was also found that most people who read this product ranged from ages 25-54 years old, and there were fewer users from ages 18-49. Also, the majority of users were home owners and 40% had a college degree. This means that there are probably a large amount of people who have some free time at home to do simple crafts like the ones advertised in HGTV magazine and our magazine. Therefore, HGTV has a similar target audience to ours.

Target Audience Research- Better Homes and Gardens

For this magazine, it was found that they have a target audience of mostly women who, on average, were 51 years old. However, it was also found that most of the consumers who enjoyed the magazine were suburban women in general who enjoyed spending time at home. This is similar to our target audience because we are also gearing out product towards anyone who has free time at home for crafts, cooking, or decorating. This magazine has been able to advertise their product through mobile apps, print magazines, through social media, and in stores such as Walmart. One way they used persuasive techniques in advertising was sharing how they have switched to online resources as well as print to market to a wider audience, including younger people who use technology more. Additionally, inside each magazine, many photos of women are featured, along with feminine-directed crafts and ideas. This is to market to their mostly female audience. Overall, the types of media they use include print and digital, specifically social media.

Target Audience Research- Good Housekeeping

For the research done on this magazine, we discovered many different traits that corresponded to their target audience. This product was found to have a target audience of middle aged and slightly over, which is similar to our magazine's intended consumer type. The way they marketed their product was in a newsletter, on their website, and through social media such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. This was successful through the use of persuasive techniques including intriguing material in newsletters and social media to attract consumers. Additionally, they utilized their newsletter and social media in part to act as a monthly reminder of their new product. Overall, they used media such as social media and digital emails to advertise their product to their target audience.

Target Audience Research- The Crafting Corner (our magazine)

For our magazine, we decided to pursue a target audience of stay-at-home parents or anyone who enjoys home making and decor. This might include a majority of middle aged men or women who have free time to craft, cook, or decorate during the day at home. Additionally, our magazine is not location specific, meaning it would be distributed nationwide, primarily in the US. Furthermore, the topics included in our magazine are, for the most part, fairly simple and uncomplicated. This means our intended consumers only really need above an intermediate level of education to enjoy our product. Additionally, people with an average income level of approximately $30,000 a year are included in our target audience. Overall, our magazine is made for anyone with a passion for creativity.

Feedback/ Revisions

     For the magazine draft, my team did fairly well with the basic design and layout of the product. However, there are some details that need to be edited before the final draft. For example, my partner and I had most of the same formatting details such as font, text size, and title page layout, but some parts weren't the same. This includes differences in the TOC layout and page numbers. These can be easily edited and fixed. Additionally, my partner and I both used clip art to decorate out TOC's and articles. The clip art only included small pictures but some need to be made larger to stand out. However, we shouldn't make them too big since they would then be copyright and take away from our own photos. Another revision needed to perfect our product is justifying out article columns. Currently, they are formatted on the left side, and would look more professional if made to fill up the whole text-box space available rather than leaving white space.  To contribute to the professionalism of the title page, I may add some more text underneath the title to fill up some empty space. This will also give me more room to advertise other articles in the magazine and make the reader more interested in the product. Additionally, both our magazines could be improved by increasing the variation of photos. Although we have a variety of items in photos, both of our drafts only include pictures of crafts and objects. However, this can be improved by including photos of people making the crafts. This would make the articles seem more interesting and relatable. It will also demonstrate that we utilized pictures from multiple photos shoots. A final aspect of our magazines that should be revised is adding some sort of branding to the page numbers, similar to what a professional magazine would do. This includes text describing the featured article, an advertisement, or other words that would intrigue the reader. Overall, the magazines were both well made, but do have room for improvement.

Use of Conventions

How does your project use or challenge conventions of your genre, and how does it represent social groups or issues?

     For our project, we researched numerous magazines featuring many different themes. Some products focused on cooking ideas, some discussed easy DIY crafts, and some were about home decor or gardening. We took the ideas from some of our researched magazines and combined them all in our magazine. We decided that rather than having only one topic area for our plan, we could incorporate all different kinds of "crafting". Therefore, we both used and challenged conventions of other magazines within our genre. We used the ideas of other products to broaden the span of topics within our final product but also were unique in the fact that our magazine didn't just focus on one theme.
   Additionally, our magazine has a theme and topic area that relates to artists and even non-artists who would like to learn how to be better at crafting, cooking, or decorating. Although our product doesn't have a serious tone to it, it allows people to escape from the monotony of everyday life and enjoy creating something, even if just for a short while. Overall, it is a great source of entertainment with anyone with a passion for art, cooking, or decorating.