Evaluation of a School Magazine

I produced a school magazine front cover and contents page for the Preliminary exercise. During the construction of both media products, I used Photoshop and Quark Xpress. My strengths and weaknesses whilst using both programs are as follows. 

To create my school magazine front cover, I used Adobe Photoshop. The colours I have used are yellow and black. I chose these colours because they are simple and do not mismatch with each other. My main image is a medium close up of a student. To improve this, I could make the photo more in focus because it looks blurred and i could also add more colour to her face. Furthermore, I made the price stand out by adding a star-like shape to it. Therefore, my strength is attracting the audience to buy this magazine because it is cheap and that is how it challenges real media products. However, my weakness is in my photography and editing the images. I should also use more images on the front cover by adding layers to attract people to buy the magazine because it will make the magazine seem more interesting.

To construct my school contents page, I used Quark Xpress . It's the first time I've ever used this program and I found that it is very straightforward to use but I am limited on designing. My contents page follows the codes and conventions as it uses consistent colours and the text size is right size (11pt). Although I could have made my main article image the biggest image on the page.

Overall, my main strength in making both products is being able to attract the audiences attention with my use of bright colours. However my weakness is using the different techniques on both programs. Hopefully, by the time I construct my products for the main task i would've developed my skills, which will result in a much better media product.

Photographs For School Magazine

Rough layout of Front Cover and Contents Page

Front cover sketchContents page sketch

Plans for Contents Page

List of the regular contents:

• Geek Puzzels...“Play and you could win a chance to meet JLS!!"
• Uniforms Info...“Better, cheaper and aimed to make you smarter”
• Terrific Trips...“This year all our students will enjoy an adventurous tour around the UK!!”

List of images that I will use:

• A mini photo of the front cover
• Two friends looking very happy to get their results
• A girl standing in the corridor, smiling
• Another girl smiling

Plans For Front Cover

Mise-en-scene for front cover image:

• A classroom
• Medium Close Up
• Girl in school uniform

Coverlines for the front cover:

• A*'s for Life
• 99 ways to a succesful life
• Gold Rewards for the top 10 students
• Exam results improve by 30%