Preliminary Task- Evaluation of college magazine cover and contents page.
For our preliminary task we were instructed to create a college magazine cover page and contents page. We had to do this using Photoshop for the cover page and InDesign for the contents page and also using our knowledge of magazines we have seen ourselves and magazines we have analysed in the lesson. The aim was to make it look like a real magazine and to do this we had to include things that your would see in real magazines such as skylines, pull quotes, cover lines, logo's, and more. For my evaluation I will be discussing the things that I believe went well and what I could have improved and also the comments that were left by my fellow pupils.
This was the cover page I made for my college magazine using Photoshop. I think there are many things that went well in my cover page, to begin with, the photo I used. This photo was taken outside in a green area, I thought it was a good idea to use a photo with a a bright background instead of a plain background as it would be more eye catching. When creating the cover page I thought to maybe blur the background of the photo to draw more attention to my cover star but I decided this was not necessary because although the background is just as bright as my cover star the bottom half of the picture in dark which keeps the colours balance keeping the attention on the cover star. Also I think the image itself is quite a reasonable image to use for a college magazine as it clearly shows a happy student studying outside. The fact that she is studying outside helps the reader to assume that weather was nice that day and the sun was out and sunny weather relates to being happy and optimistic which adds a great tone to the magazine.
Moving onto something else I believe went well in my cover page, the colour scheme. As you can see the colour scheme of my college magazine cover consists of a light blue, white and a bright, the reason for me using these colours was not only because I thought they went quite well with the image in the background but also because the colours in the background are bright and i wanted to keep this trend going. Due to the fact that part of the background image is green and wanted to use green text I knew there would be a chance that my writing would not be very clear to read as it would just blend in with the background so i decided to outline the text using black so it would stand out without me having to change my colour scheme. I think the areas of writing where attention is mostly drawn to is where there is white text and because of this I use the white text as the subheading and names and other important details on the magazine cover such as the price, date, website and issue number.
Another aspect of my college magazine that I think was a success was the layout of the different features. First of all I kept the amount of cover lines I used to a minimum as with all the colours going on in the background having many cover lines would make it a bit to overwhelming. In total I have incorporated 3 cover lines on my magazine cover and an additional skyline and pull quote. I kept each cover line not too far from each other and not too close to each other but still covering enough pf the background image. I think have the pull quote at the bottom of the cover page and having it bigger than the cover lines was an effective way to draw the readers attention to it. I also did this as it something about the cover star and in other magazines when the pull quote has something to do with the cover star tends to be big and bold and eye catching which is what I was trying to achieve with mine. I kept the skyline basic by simple just making it the name of the college because of the fact that the skyline doesn't have anything to do with anything specific article of feature withing the magazine it would most definitely be something that would be kept as a regular thing in other issues as it is a simple way of reminding the reader of what where the magazine is from
In addition to this, I think that the the font of the mast head and other texts on my magazine cover was one of the best features about it and the font that I use was simple and easy to read but has an edge to it. The reason for me using a font that is minimalistic is to insure that the reader had no trouble at all trying to read it. Although my target audience for this was young adults and parents and these groups of people would be expected to be able to read any fonts I still decided to go with this one. I thought that using a more fun and detailed font would make it seem childish and informal and using a font that is incredibly basic like for example Arial, would make the magazine look boring. So my decision was to go with a simple but edgy font. The reason behind me making all the main bits of text on my cover page in upper case is because with the three different colours of text already there I didn't want to make it look overwhelming by using lower and uppercase letters so I just kept it all at one level.
When it comes to journalism, my target audience was young adults and parents as mention earlier on in the evaluation and to show this I kept all the language I used formal.
Tom improve my college magazine cover page I could have insured that the colour of text and the background didn't clash at all as it did slightly even though I had outlined the text. Also I would have dimmed the background image a bit too as it is very bright to look at.
Comments left by fellow pupils about my cover page:
"The colour scheme you have used (green and white) looks good but the
addition of the colour blue doesn't go well with the colour scheme. You
have used a good image which shows the student is happy and is studying.
You have enough cover lines which have filled the space on your
magazine. I feel £2 is not the ideal price for a college magazine
because I doubt a student would spend £2 on a college magazine." - Omaimaa Rehman
"I really like the way your magazine is layered out, its quite
professional. The use of the masthead and skyline are quite effective as
they help your cover page stand out. You've used a variety of skills
such as the logo which I think is quite sophisticated as it advertises
the college. However the colour of the background perhaps is quite
bright and pull quotes would've been a good way to help show a clear
insight of what the magazine is going to be about." - Aamna Ali
When it came to creating our magazine contents pages we used InDesign. Just like with my cover page I would say that there were many things that went well within my contents page. Firstly, I will begin with the background image. The photo used in the background clearly shows two students of LSC, a boy and a girl, stood up studying with expressions on their faces showing that they are happy. When I first placed the picture I didn't think it would work very well with what I was going to put on my contents page so with some help from my media teacher I was able to make the image look transparent which I thought was a very good an original effect to use. The reason for me using two people in my background image and making it a long shot was because I wanted to keep my contents very simple without crowding it with too much text and having this as my background image draws attention away from the fact that there is not a lot of text on my contents page which is a good thing.
Moving onto the text on my college magazine contents page, I decided to have three main areas in my magazine and they were main features, competitions and quizzes. I put these subheadings in capitals letters and highlighted them to insure that they would be catch by the readers attention. My title for this page is quite basic as it just blue and big. The rest of the text on my page is just page numbers and article headings as you can see the text is pretty basic so there is not much to say about it. I keep the font the same as what it was on the front cover page to save the reader from being confused as they go on through the magazine.
The colour scheme that consisted of blue, white and green was followed through into the contents page, the green was used for highlighting and picture borders, the white was used for the subheadings and the website and finally the blue was used for the page numbers and article titles and the title of my contents page. All this makes the contents look very neat and organised but simple which was the look that as was going for because from the research I had done and other magazine I had looked at I noticed that some contents pages were quite crowed and disorganised making it hard to find things and there were others that were simple and those were the ones that I had preferred.
In addition to this I kept the logo from my front cover and put it in the contents page which is not seen in many magazines I did this because I think that logo of any magazine should be remembered by the reader and should be recognised by the reader somewhere else so seeing it on each page of the magazine would help it to stay in the readers mind as something that they know of. This is the same reason I have for including the website as well. Just to change things up a bit I decided to use a picture in the bottom right hand corner of my magazine contents page and referring tit to a certain page in my magazine. I thought it was a clever thing to do.
To improve my contents page I should have use more of the space I had although i was trying to keep it simple there still was a lot more I could have included to make it look better. For example more text, more relevant pictures referring to certain articles and more colour.
Comments left by fellow pupils about my contents page:
"The colour scheme is consistent from the front cover which is good. You
have used a transparent image in the background which looks good but you
have only used one image otherwise, you could have added more images. I
don't think the colour scheme works well together but overall looking at
the front cover and contents page it's a good magazine :)." - Omaimaa Rehman
"Your background is quite unusual as its faded away but I like the way
the bottom picture has a border around it to show that it stands out.
However the colours don't really go with the background but its a really
good contents page overall so well done!" - Aamna Ali
Three points for development for my music magazine
- Use colours that do not clash with background even a little bit and use colours that go well together and no just any random colours.
- Think more about the layout and positioning on certain things especially on my contents page and insure there is enough to fill up the space I have efficiently.
- Keep using the logo and website in each page as it is a good way of making the reader remember them.
