Creative Critical Reflection- early draft

 

Here is an early draft of my creative critical reflection-not the final one just put it here to reflect on my work so far

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

My magazine targets a younger audience and strives to highlight non-mainstream cultural showcases of various art forms. Although it doesn’t have many like it, a comparison could be made to modern contemporary art magazines, which are quite boring in terms of codes and conventions as they are aimed at a very specific audience. However, my magazine is made for a mostly non-specific audience aside from age. The codes and conventions I used take this into account, as I drew inspiration from visually unique magazines, namely Vogue Arabia, Fisheye Magazine, etc. Since it is partly a travel magazine, I made sure to include a section called ‘Conscious Travel Practice.’ This section advises people on how to visit these places while keeping in mind the social and environmental ecosystem to avoid causing damage. This addresses and tackles the issue of overtourism or irresponsible tourism, which can result in environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, damage to cultural sites, and economic and social issues for local residents.

 How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text? 

Kayama is an and culture magazine meant to show different aspects of artistry and “way of life” of different areas worldwide.This specific issue is on visual artistry and the east african coast, mainly just Mombasa, however it is meant to showcase a new format palatable for a younger audience. It is not meant to be extremely verbose or wordy it engages with the audience taking into account short attention spans of the audience,hence why it is only 32 pages, much shorter than the real world magazines that are somewhat similar to kayama. As for distribution it would be both digital and print considering the downtread of physical print magazine consumption.perhaps even multimedia integration could be included by using social-media and maybe video interviews paired with the potential digital subscription .

How did your production skills develop throughout this project? 

My production skills improved greatly as i was already able to design non magazine related things but taking into account the codes and conventions and research i did  aided me in creating better and better outcomes as i realized that  great deal of production is trial and error as well as taking into consideration your audience/consumer’s likely preferences what they might want to see as it is them who purchase the product. 

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online – in this project?

For Hardware I used a canon camera to take most of my pictures which means learning how to do a composition that fits into the codes and conventions of my magazine as well as image editing software such as adobe photoshop this enabled me to edit all aspects of my magazine, however the font selection on photoshop is quite boring in my opinion so I outsourced fonts from a website called dafonts.com as well as unique typefaces made by multiple designers online. When researching I utilised both a mobile phone and laptop to keep track of progress on blogger.com,where my blog is showcasing everything in this project I have done so far.