Evaluation

Evaluation:

The brief was to create a front cover and a mock contents page for a new college magazine, using Photoshop and Publisher. The front cover had to feature a image of student, The photo itself had to be a medium close up photo (just above the shoulders). All our work then had to be published on Blogger.com. We had to create hand drawn drafts and IT drafts for our assignment. When creating the magazine I had to take into account L.I.I.A.R. (Language, Institution, Ideology, Audience and Representation.)

The first task I set myself was to do research on college magazines and begin an analysis of the covers. Online I found two magazine covers on featuring a student and the other featuring a elderly man (possibly a member of staff). Whilst looking at the covers, I realised that the cover was aimed at a audience of students. The Mast head was appealing as well as the cover lines, I had to apply this when designing my cover. When looking closer at the magazines I looked at the features of a magazine and looked at what goes on to the cover of a college magazine. As the magazine was aimed at a college I realised there was no use for a bar code or a selling line, because the magazine would have been free to distribute around the college. On the other hand I decided that it would be a better idea to have a student on the front cover rather then a member of staff, like the covers I was looking at. This would appeal more to the college which is mainly students.

My initial idea was to have My model stood on the balcony in the ash building therefore giving the image the college is modern and sophisticated. However my plans changed when I had the idea of putting my model at the bottom of some stairs, the ideology behind this is, the magazine is called aim (Aim Higher) therefore having a student at the bottom of satires symbolises there climb and effort to achieve what they want to achieve. This was a big change to my beginning plan, However it seemed to work quite well. When taking the photo I decided that I would have my model in the lower right corner of the cover, therefore allowing more room for cover lines and also allowed the mast head and subtitle to stand out more. When I had been looking at magazine covers they all used quite unique designs for there font. This made me decided to design my colours and fonts around the time of which the magazine would have gone out. Therefore the colours I used were; Orange, Yellow, Brown and Black. This gave the feel of Autumn to the magazine again this worked well as the magazine would have been released in Autumn. I also chose quite classy and sophisticated fonts to the cover. I had my model hold a green folder the colour, I used green to give the college a fresh and chilled look. I also applied the colleges name and logo at either end of the sub-title giving the reader a sense of been part of a group.

For the wording of my cover I decided that my target was the students, so to try and appeal to them I keep referring to them an example of this is my sub-title, ‘The Mag Made For Students, By Students’. This gave the audience the impression that the magazine has everything they want to read about. The cover also featured cover lines which implied things that would interested students, such as revision tips. However I also thought about what to put word wise on the cover, because it was Autumn some people have exams in January therefore by giving revision tips now students may be more interested.
For the contents I carried on the theme of Autumn and had the title and text in a brown shade. I also had the colleges logo as the bullet points. To try and appeal to the audience more I would have had photos of college events in the left hand margin. The top part of the contents would have articles/feature which would appeal to students more and the lower half would have all articles/features in numeric order.

The magazine cover looks realistic, with the exception of a bar code, left third and selling line. The cover does have some of the conventions of a real magazine, it has things which appeal to its target audience such as, cover lines, sub-title and a masthead. I used Photoshop to allow me to change the scale of my photo and create the over all product, using Photoshop I also changed the contrast of the image and applied the text. Publisher was used to create my basic drafts, by using text boxes and word art, I was able to create mock ups of what the overall magazine would look like.