Drafting and Planning: Feedback on First Draft

General Feedback

As a class, we received some general feedback, which included some things that I have already done but also included some things that I have not. The feedback we received was:

• Must establish ideas from Research into Similar Products
• E.g. asking ourselves “where did this idea come from?”
• “New single” never appears on the front cover of a magazine as a cover line.
• Instead, you will find “New album” or “Upcoming tour” – usually both
• Artists lack musical Mise-en-scene.
• E.g. wrong costume, wrong body language, etc.
• Contents pages tend to lack “Substance”
• i.e. low number of pages (e.g. below 100 pages for a monthly magazine)
• too few cover lines in the table of contents
• Front Covers, Contents Pages and Double Page Spreads all need a “holistic” approach
• E.g. using the same cover star on the cover, contents and DPS. Using cover lines on the cover on the table of contents on the Contents Page
• Content for DPS tends to be “Corny” with not enough content.
• i.e. avoid saying things like “My fans are the most important thing to me”
• Font size for DPS must be 8
• Focus on SPaG – marks will be lost for poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Personal Feedback

My teacher and I had a one-to-one talk about feedback on my magazine, some of the feedback he gave me included:

• The proportions of my masthead to my main cover star are off, masthead needs to be smaller and pushed upwards.
• My skyline needs a lot of work – at the moment it looks too plain.
• My main cover line needs to be more centralised and straight on my cover page.
• My secondary cover lines need improvement. Currently, they are too blocky, could space them out a bit, centre my cover star and put cover lines around my cover star.
• My DPS needs more content – not enough content of my article.