Tuesday, 15 February 2011

Evaluation for Preliminary Task

In the process of making this front cover I wanted to choose the name of it so that I would be able to base everything in the magazine around that name. I thought of the theme of socialising in college, so I came up with ‘Student Social’. This name is short and catchy, something that students can talk about easily. 
When I got the name, I needed a picture, a medium close of a student. So I firstly went onto Google images to see if there may be a college student on the phone, but the images I saw were not to my taste and was quite cheesy, where I was going for something more understated and simple. I asked my friend, who does photography, if I could take a picture of her pretending to be on the phone. It was very useful to me that she was a photography student because I was able to use her professional camera, enabling me to use the different settings and learn how to take a great high quality photograph. I uploaded the picture with a muted background so that I could start to develop what the magazine front cover would look like. In the picture, I thought it would be a good idea to have her on the phone looking away from the camera, so it was not too obvious her picture was being taken, so that the front cover was not all about her and the way she is posing, but the most important factor is the masthead.
I did some research into front covers and tried to make it so that the target readers (students) could relate and want to buy the magazine. When researching the front covers, I looked at the colours being used; I noticed how for a younger audience the magazines used more bright and vibrant colours, whilst the more modern and glossy magazines used neutral colours.  When writing the text around the cover I firstly used different brought colours for each headline, however, this did not look great, it looked quite tacky so I immediately started to change around the text and colour of the text. I decided that white text would be the best option because it was simple and not in your face. For the type of text itself, I also did a bit of research looking at glossy magazines for inspiration wanting to make a good quality as I could possibly get. So I played around a couple times with a different fonts, until I found one that looked exactly like the text used on the cover of Elle magazine, so I thought I would use this font for the masthead as well, this font was Engravers MT.
When researching Student/College magazines i noticed the same things, including how the picture was a big factor for the magazines more focused on the student rather than the college. For the magazine that was an actual college magazine the main focus was how the college came across to the reader not about the students and their interests. However, for the College News magazine, a famous singer was on the front cover showing how the students would be interested in a magazine that had a famous singer on the front, in contrast to a magazine that had a picture of a school on the cover. So from this I learnt that the image for my magazine, because it is focused on students would not be of a school or a college but of an
actual student so that readers could relate to the image.

The contents page is very minimal; I did not want to contrast too much with the front cover, so I thought that the same background colour as the front image would blend well together. The red writing stands out so that the subheadings are easy to spot, so the reader can easily direct their own way o the page they want. I looked at Bazaar magazine for my inspiration for the contents page, I noticed how it was very simple and used to bold red writing also. This made it seem more understated, making it more glossy looking. Originally for the contents page had just plain black bold writing, with a white background but this was not very creative and I wanted something more interesting. So when I researched into contents pages I noticed the factors were small writing and pictures in the top or bottom. I thought that if I included a picture in the contents page it might live it up a bit. This was important as I did not want it to look boring. When looking at College News magazine's contents page it was filled with images and text explaining what was in the magazine. When looking at the other two contents pages, they were much more functional focusing on the contents of the magazine rather than the images. I think it is important to have a good balance between having the page look functional but also appealing to the reader by having images.
To conclude, researching into what magazines look like on the front cover and the contents helped me design and create my magazine. I incorporated what I saw on Seventeen magazine front cover, where the masthead is overlapping the picture into my magazine and I used the minimalistic approach like the Vogue cover for my own.

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