RESPONDING TO FEEDBACK

MAGAZINE ADVERT

The responses to my survey on my magazine advert were mostly positive, but there was some constructive criticism that I responded to. Therefore I haven’t included the responses to every question here, just the ones that caused me to go back and change things.

I’ve discussed the relevant responses here, explaining what I learnt from the feedback and how it changed my final product

Just to get an initial response, I asked people to rate the advert on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of how professional and how cohesive it was. I didn’t get any rates below 5, which I was happy with. For professionalism most people voted 10/10 or 8/10 and for cohesion it was slightly lower with most people going for 7/10. Whilst these are not bad ratings, it drew my attention to the fact that I needed to make some adjustments to my designs.

This question was one of the, if not the, most important question for me in terms of feedback. After all, the aim of the product is to create an advert that encourages people to buy the album so obviously it’s useful to know whether people would. As you can see above, the majority of my feedback said that they would buy or at least be interested in listening to the album. I asked people to explain why if they selected ‘no’ and the two ‘no’ responses above where because “the picture doesn’t seem relevant to the genres I like” and because “I don’t buy albums without listening to them first”. I’m happy with this as it’s to be expected that the advert won’t appeal to everyone’s taste, but I still got a majority who the album appealed to. I personally wouldn’t buy an album without listening to it first anyway so I don’t see it as a bad thing that the advert makes people want to listen to the album rather than just immediately go out and buy it. Realistically that would be the reaction I would hope for if this advert were actually published.

This was an interesting question as throughout my project I’ve tried to keep my products neutral so that they wouldn’t target a specific gender or age and therefore would reach a wider audience. Fortunately most people seem to have picked up on this and voted that the advert doesn’t appeal to a certain type of person.I asked people who thought it did target a certain age or gender to specify what group they thought it was and their responses are shown on the next slide. Nobody mentioned gender, which is good because I want my products to appeal to all genders. Most people thought that the advert targeted older teenagers/young adults and whilst that wasn’t my intention when I started planning necessarily, it is the conventional audience for consuming music and probably would me my main market if the album were to be sold, so I don’t think it means I need to change my product drastically.

This was another important question as the advert is supposed to represent the artist’s style and sound, and genre is a big part of that. The majority of people said Indie which suggests that I’ve effectively used conventions of that genre. There were a few other responses like pop, rock, rap, alternative etc. which is to be expected as everyone has different views on what genres look like, but overall I feel I’ve managed to produce an advert that looks like it belongs to the Indie genre.

RESPONDING TO SPECIFIC FEEDBACK

As well as the general responses from my survey, I looked at specific criticism that was given and used it to improve my product.

Over the next few slides I’ve shown the comments that made me want to change things and then my Photoshop process of how I went about changing them.

I’ll post the final re-edited version of my magazine advert in a separate post.

“I have to add that NME rates out of 10 so 5 stars really isn’t that much. I would personally space out the ratings a bit more; they’re a bit too close. Also the title letters aren’t aligned so I can’t tell if they’re supposed to be centred or justified. I would also not leave that much space between the top of the advert and the band name but that’s just my opinion”

This was one of the comments on the survey that I found really useful as it helped me see changes that needed to be made that I hadn’t spotted myself. The first thing they mention is the ratings. I want my product to look as professional as possible so it’s important to me that the information on there is accurate. Therefore I changed the NME rating and subsequently decided to change the other ratings as well, just to keep the cohesion there, and finally repositioned the ratings towards the bottom as they suggested.The next thing they commented on was the alignment of the title; it’s something fairly small but again I want my product to look professional and that means getting all the little details right. I edited the positioning of the letters of the title to ensure they were aligned better.The final thing was the space between the top of the advert and the band name. Whilst this was another useful comment, I actually decided against changing the positioning as when I experimented with moving the text, I wasn’t happy with the result. It made me realise that feedback is really useful, but you can’t let it alter your own design too much.Over the next few slides I’ve explained how I made this alterations in Photoshop.

CHANGING THE RATINGS:

• Made the stars smaller using the Transform tool

• Duplicated the layer so that there were ten stars rather than five

• Positioned the new rating over the NME text and merged the layers

CHANGING THE ALIGNMENT OF LETTERS:

• Used the text tool to edit the text• Typed spaces in between the letters that

need to be more spaced out• Edited the pt size of the spaces so that

they would be bigger or smaller as necessary

BEFORE AFTER