Ideology

Ideology is an idea of how society should function, a world view, a system of values, attitudes and beliefs which an individual believes to be true or important shared by a culture or society. There are often hidden behind media, like secret messages and media is a successful carrier of ideology as it reaches out to such a huge target audience.

Feminism

Women have had to fight for equality and rights from males throughout history, and it wasn't until the 20th century for women to even be compared as equals. A 'reward' to the women, for keeping everything running while the men were away fighting in WW2, was the right to vote and this lead to men actually realizing our importance in society. But even now Feminism is still a issue, as we are turned into sexual objects by the media, or we are abused at work.
Laura Mulvery, a feminist film theorist has worked for many years in the British Film Institute, Laura claims that Hollywood cinematography puts the viewer in a masculine subject position, with the figure of a woman on the screen as an object of desire. This theory has developed to highlight the power between men and women analysing the way men actually see women, and the way women see themselves and other women. The theory comments on how the audience are forced to view from the perspective of a heterosexual male, films focus on women's faults and events that happen are portrayed to them at a male angle. This theory, named the male gaze, denies women of human agency, relegating them to almost objects.

Semiotics

The study of sign processes, signs and symbols, or communication and signification is known as Semiotics. Semiotics was first invented by a linguist and philosopher called Saussure, he was from Switzerland and his ideas found many significant developments in linguistics and semiotics in today's society.

Semiotics is usually divided into three different branches, Semantics, Syntatics and Pragmatics, these three branches are similar but have differences in them. Semantics is the relation between the sign and the things in which they refer, while Syntactics is the relations among signs in formal structures and then Pragmatics are the relation between signs and then the effects on the people who use them.

We looked at several different signs and advertisements to understand the uses of semiotics. One of the signs we was shown was the universal symbol for the women's toilets. We use this image as it conveys that the area is for women only, and the woman's figure on the sign is widely recognized. Also there is no font used in this sign, this is useful as it can be understood worldwide. The symbol is that the figure is used internationally and it has the meaning everywhere you go.

Adobe InDesign

During the past few weeks we have been learning how to use several Adobe products which will help make our magazine look professional and efficient. First we used Adobe Photoshop, then most recently we used Adobe InDesign. InDesign is used to create high end newspapers and magazines and will be crucial in making our magazine look as professional as possible. The software allows us to correctly position, align and efficiently organise images and text. But even before opening this essential software we are given options, whether we want guidelines on the page, whether we want gutters, borders, what size we want and how many pages. InDesign is extremely useful when you come to add text, spacing it out giving every page a organised professional look. 

This was the double page spread  I managed to create using  InDesign within an hour, the software is hard to get your head around at first but once you know the basics you are flying. The text is neatly organised into three columns, with a quote from the text in the middle, a sub heading and a heading,they all make my double page spread look as professional as possible.