Exam Question: Research and Planning

To make a product successful it is essential to be aware of what products are already on the market so that you are not creating something that is too much like another product because this means it would be less likely to be successful because you are not offering your target audience something new or exciting. As Bentley suggests the 'creation of the new is the rearrangement of the old' with this in mind I looked at existing products to find what they already offer and took the good things about these magazines and carried them through to my product but with a fresh look on it so that my product is not a replication of an existing product but so that it is to a high enough standard to be able to compete with products that already exist.
For my AS project I looked mostly at Kerrang! and NME and what conventions they followed in their product and what they did that did not follow the conventions of a Rock magazine. I also looked at their house styles to get an idea of how to make my music magazine look like when I was creating style models. I looked at colour combinations used by Rock magazines to get an idea of the colours that I should be using to help to appeal to the target audience, from doing this I found that most existing magazines of the Rock genre tended to use quite dark colours like black, red, grey and usually one very bright colour like yellow or orange so for my magazine I decided to use red, black, white and gold as my main colours.
For my A2 project I also looked at existing products like Cornwall Life, Cornwall Today and Devon Life to find the conventions of a regional magazine as these would be very different to the ones that I used in my AS product. I also had to try and find ways to make my product look like a professional, sophisticated magazine because unlike my AS product its target audience was much older so things that would have appealed to my audience in my music magazine would not appeal to the people who I want to read my regional magazine for Cornwall. I also used study groups to find out what they liked about existing magazines, primarily Cornwall Today so that I could get feedback in person about what things I should be looking to include in my magazine.
Although my main focus when planning my products was the overall look that I wanted it to have there were other things that I had to look into that were important to know before trying to create my product. This included camera angles and the different shot types, i had to research lighting to be able to get good quality pictures with the right sort of light in my photos and then I used videos on youtube and tutorial websites to find the right methods to edit my images.