Evaluation of preliminary task

My preliminary task was to create a magazine front cover and contents page for a college magazine. To start off, I went onto the Internet and researched lots of different magazines that would attract college students. By doing this I got an insight of what I should be including in my magazines and what college students like. After doing this I went out around the college in a group of four taking pictures on a camera of things around the college that I may be able to use in my magazine. When taking the photos I had to get different angles and focus depths on the images to make the pictures more effective for my magazine. After I had got my images I picked the image that would be the most useful to me and started to work on my magazine.

In this task I found that the layout of the overall magazine was the easiest as they are basically all the same. I included a masthead, central image, sell lines, tagline, date, price and included inside stories down the side. Another aspect of creating the magazine that I liked was using Photoshop. I enjoyed using Photoshop as it was the first time that I had used it in a while so I wasn’t quite up to scratch when I fist started as I couldn’t remember which tool did what. After I had been using Photoshop for a bit I started to get used to it again though as everything came back to me and I was comfortable on it again. However there were some aspects of creating the magazine that I struggled with. One of them was the font style and color for the genre of music that I had picked which would go with the background color. This is because I made the background image grey, as you wouldn’t interpret luminous colors with rap music. I managed to solve this problem by having a theme that I would use, which was only to use black white and red. I think that this makes the magazine more effective. Also I enjoyed working in a group getting to know the other students in my class a bit more and it weren’t as awkward as I was first expecting.

I liked using Photoshop for this task as I think that Photoshop can be very useful for editing images and having a good layout due to the layers. This also made it easier for me as I had used it before. I also liked comparing my layouts to other layouts that I had thought of to get the best one. This means that the magazine will be a better standard.

I created the masthead and shapes that I used to split up the stories down the side myself easily and I made sure that the masthead was simple but effective so that It would be easily recognizable.

In the contents page I wanted to make it look more mature so I used a model who looks like a rapper to show what the magazine will be about and this shows what type of contents will be in the magazine. I also stuck to the same color scheme to make the magazine more repetitive.