Evaluation

Evaluation of Preliminary Magazine

I started by looking through different school magazines to collate my ideas for my own school magazine; and from them I found that they have a masthead which is called ‘excel’ this is blue and red which stands out in the back ground colour which on the one I looked at was black. This makes the main image stand out, also because the main cover story was about talent and the winners performed thriller so the black makes it more realistic with the story. The main house style of the school magazines was blue, red white and black and this was continued throughout the magazine which makes it look professional. At the bottom of the magazine there is a plug this tells us what’s happening inside the magazine, the date is always kept under the masthead and ‘The Armthorpe School Magazine’ is always kept above the masthead.

Then we moved on to the planning stage and this consisted of sketching out three different possible layouts for the front cover and three possible layouts for the contents page, which consisted of graphic design symbols, before deciding on the final design. When I had decided on the layout for my school magazine I had to go out and take lots of pictures to use on the front cover and on the contents page. I used this image of fame for the front covers main image and this is because The Armthorpe School specialises in the arts and sports therefore an image of one of the school productions is relevant. I then decided for my plugs I would stick with the arts theme by telling people that we will rock you and Shakespeare schools festival is coming to the Armthorpe school soon as a little taster so it will make them read on and want to come and watch them when they are on.

Inside my magazine my house style colours are black and white this is because the front cover image is quite dark and has a black background, so therefore sticking with the colour scheme of my front cover I decided to change from the original school magazine house style of blue red white and black just to black and white. I did this because I thought, and tried out that blue looked silly in contrast with my front cover. The original school magazines that we looked at were called ‘excel’ but I decided to change mine to ‘Academy news’ which is in white, this stands out on my black background.

I developed all of these ideas on Adobe Photoshop CS6 as I am new to this software therefore I only used basic skills like importing images and adding texts. I feel that when we move onto our final design on our music magazine I will be more confident with using Photoshop.  My contents page is very basic as all that is on it is text and images and a gradient background, which goes from black to white. Although it’s very basic and plan it sort of works as you don’t want it to be too busy this is because it is aimed at students and they can be quite lazy and not really be interested in what’s happening at school and they don’t really want to be read that much so I included lots of images so it is visually stimulating and appeals to a wider audience of students. One of my images is the stain glass window which we use to remember one our teachers I used this image and story in particular because I feel that it will appeal to all of the students as they can remember him by it and even new students who didn’t know him will find it interesting to read.

Overall, I am quite pleased with my first magazine that I have done, although there is still a lot of improvement to be done as I feel that the colour scheme is quite dull and there isn’t that much information on either my front cover or my contents page and they are quite bland and not that appealing to a wider school audience especially because of the colour scheme. Next time I do a magazine, which will be my music one I will make sure that the colours are bright and look aesthetically pleasing to the eye as this will make more people want to buy and look at it, also I will add more information to both the contents page and the front cover.