Evaluation Question 2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

For our ancillary tasks we chose to create a magazine cover and a website. We chose to create a magazine cover because we could imagine our artist on the cover of a magazine and we had studied magazines in the Collective Identity section of our course which gave us the confidence and skills to create the cover. In addition we decided to create a website because we felt it would be slightly more challenging and would be more effective form of advertisement as the internet is such a huge media convention.
We researched into a variety of different existing magazines for our first ancillary task. In particular we looked at magazines which fell into two categories: magazines such as Vogue, Marie Clare and Cosmopolitan, whose main target audience was aimed at females and mainly featured women; or magazines such as GQ, Nuts and Zoo which sometimes featured female music artists and targeted men in particular. We decided to use the Magazine Vogue because, although we wanted our artist to have a sassy and sexy look, creating a cover for a men’s magazine would be expanding this image to give a cheap and slightly injudicious appearance.
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine which is published in eighteen different countries and noted in the New York Times as being ‘the world’s most influential fashion magazine.’ We therefore chose this magazine as it linked to the idea of creating our female artist as a fashion icon to improve her celebrity status. In addition is would reach a greater number o our target audience as it is published in so many countries.
We immediately began researching recent existing vogue covers for inspiration. We look specifically at covers featuring music artists in connection to our task.

Vogue was perfect in association to our music video as it could be used to reflect the fashion, musical talent and celebrity status of our music artist all just on the cover. We chose to use an image of our female artist which gave her the same classy and sophisticated appeal as in the music video, and so she is featured wearing a black dress with soft makeup. In addition, she is gazing at the camera towards the camera which we believe to highlight her celebrity status and draws the audience in more effectively.
Research of existing Vogue covers showed that they all have a very similar appearance, similarly featuring the same title at the top with subtitles in matching fonts scattered neatly around the image. In order to follow this convention we used the same techniques for our cover, using varying font sizes for subtitles and scattering them around the image of our female artist. To make our magazine cover even more realistic we researched recent stories and fashion labels for our subtitles, such as ‘30 things to buy that won’t break the bank’ which was relevant as at this time Britain was facing recession, and ‘Hottest looks for Winter’ as it was nearing winter when we produced this ancillary task. Again these fashion titles reflected the image we wished to give our female artist in our music video.

In regards to the colours we used on the cover, we wanted to use something soft to the eye but classy and provocative at the same time. We chose to use a black and white image against the pink and black font colours because we thought it made the subtitles, such as the artist’s name, much more eye-catching and the colours reflected the sophisticated appearance we were going for in the music video. In addition, the black and white image acted in continuity with the music video as many of the shots were featured in black and white.
Our second ancillary task we found much more challenging as we had little experience creating websites and had not done any class work in studying them either. We immediately began to research existing music websites for inspiration, for artists including Beyonce (http://www.beyonceonline.com/uk ), Britney Spears (http://www.britneyspears.com/) and Madonna (http://www.madonna.com/). We chose these websites in particular because they all featured female artists with fashion status and who sing a similar song genre. From these existing official websites we learnt that all the websites featured a variety of modelling images of the artists, music videos, a page for feedback and a note of all related press. We, therefore, included separate pages for each of these categories to make the website easy to use and have a more professional appearance.

http://www.wix.com/SoftToyEmergency/SOFT-TOY-EMERGENCY

Again we wanted to use a continuity of colours connecting the music video, magazine and website. We therefore used light pink and black as dominant colours within the website as they were very noticeable colours featured in the magazine and video. Similarly we used images taken from the music video throughout the website for continuity and to help with advertisement for the music video. Altogether the sassy, sophisticated appearance of the website, i believe, reflects the nature of the artist and reaches the target audience in continuity with the magazine cover and music video as well as helping to advertise the artist.