Preliminary Task

This cover of College magazine is very bright and happy looking. The girl in the image itself looks very happy and like she enjoys her time at college. The fact she seems to be wearing a jersey makes the traditional conventions of a girl on the cover of a magazine very different to this. Traditionally the girl on the front cover would be doing something more girly and wearing something more feminine, but this magazine shows her in a football outfit, showing how the college she is representing does not pose any sexist views. The image of the girl is in focus whilst the image behind her of the trees is out of focus, showing how she is the main focus of the front cover, the image behind her is of garden or a park, and the sun is shining showing that the place is a happy one to be in.
The masthead is very bright and bold above the girl’s head. This draws the audience’s eyes up to the masthead because it is in big bold red writing against an image of trees. The red writing ties in with the rest of the image because the girl’s top is red.
The text around the image varies in size; the main headlines are in bigger text and the text below, explaining the headline is considerably smaller. The colours are black and blue, this contrast not only with each other but with the rest of the front cover. The background is full of green and the masthead is in bold red, so it does not all blend together, making it all stand out against each other.

This cover of College News
magazine has a famous singer on the front, Esmee Denters. In the image she looks quite sultry and sexy perhaps appealing to a male audience. The colours in the image are very neutral with the orange on her top being the only source of colour. As she is looking right at the camera it makes it more believable that her picture is being taken for the magazine and not just copied. By having a celebrity on the cover of a magazine it enhances the chances of potential readers picking up the magazine, recognising the singer and buying it.
The masthead is an abbreviation of the actual magazine name, College News. This could relate possibly to the audience and students that read it because they may rather say the title like that. The masthead is in front of the image, overlapping, this could mean the magazine is not yet established and needs all the advertising they can get so that readers will recognise the name. The inside colour on the masthead is very natural colour and goes well with the rest of the muted image, buy having the outline in white it makes it stand out more.
In the corner they have a blackberry bar code app, this is great for those students that do have a blackberry (which would be a majority of students).
The rest of the text on the cover is in either white or yellow, these are very bold colours against the dull background. The text is overlapping the singer making the yes draw to the text because it is ‘on’ her. In the bottom corner they have a picture of fellow famous singer Justin Timberlake. For those that do not know who Esmee Denters is they can appeal to the picture of him, knowing that he will be featured in the magazine could sway readers to buy it.

This cover of the Caterhamiam school magazine is very simple including pictures of students and activities that are available at that school. If someone was potentially going to this school these images could possibly help them make their decision because it shows stuff what they may be doing. The images are of sporting activities, including rugby and running showing that they are all about being active, appealing to an audience that are sporty. The images are broken up into different squares, as if it is a puzzle being put together. This effect on the images is that the person reading would think that they could be part of the puzzle that helps make up the whole school.
In these images there are breaks at which some sayings are put down, these words are very inspirational and would maybe give someone an idea of the type of things he or she will be learning and the type of attitude that they have.
The colours used are very light and pastel, showing that the college may not be too serious and quite light hearted. The masthead is in white bold writing, against a black banner. This black banner will grab the reader’s attention because it is contrasting with the rest of the cover.

This contents page for a college magazine is very simple and well organised. This is a functional contents page because the reader will easily see the contents list and know what page to go to. 
It includes pictures of real life teachers and students and pictures of the campus, this makes it more realistic therefore appealing to whoever reads the magazine. 
The colours on the page are mainly black and white, with the headings in red so that they stand out to the reader.
By having separate features and headings it breaks the page up so that the reader can automatically go to the section they want to see first. 

This contents page is from College News magazine. This one is a double paged contents page, meaning that there is a lot of content for the reader to enjoy, and that they could not fit it all onto one page.

The main image on the page is the same girl from the front cover, singer Esmee Denters. This adds to the impact that she is main focus of the whole magazine because not only has she dominated the front cover, but also the contents pages.
On the top of pages there a series of images representing what is inside the magazine. This would appeal to anyone who enjoys looking at images and is more stimulated by them than by words.
The text on the page is very small, meaning that it could be more functional, the second page is more about what is on the website than in the magazine meaning that the readers have two sources of information from the magazine.

This contents page is from the caterhamian magazine. It has a similar image effect that it does from the front cover. This effect is that it looks like a puzzle fitting together, with the numbers part of it.
It is very simple and functional because it showed the list of contents on the side next to the images.
The list is in quite small font, and the numbers are in coloured text, so that they stand out against the white background and against the black font.

How I created my front cover and contents page

1      created an A4 sized image

2      pasted image into it

3      pressed ctrl+ d and held the shift key down, keeping proportions when resizing image

4      increased the image to fill the A4 frame

5      pressed return to apply transformation

6      created a levels adjustment to increase brightness

7      created a curves adjustment layer to increase contrast

8      saved image as a JPEG

9      then closed it and placed it in publisher

10    I started to play around with different fonts for the masthead, which I called Student Social

11    I looked at Elle magazine and saw the type of font they used was what I wanted for my cover, Engravers MT (this will also probably be the one I use for my main front cover)

12    I used different colours, starting off with a pale green and then a salmon colour but they both did not work so I ended up with choosing white with a black outline.

13    I thought about the different text around the cover and which one to use, my research into front covers helped me decide to not have a lot of text so that the main focus was the image and the masthead

14    The contents page took me a while to get right

15    First of all I had it so that it was a plain white background with bold black font with the contents list

16    I came up with different ideas for what it would say, so I keep them but wanted to change the way it looked.

17    I looked at Bazaar magazine’s contents page and saw how simple it was so decided to model it after that

18    I changed the background colour to muted neutral colour

19    And the headings in bold red so they stood out.

20    And took a picture of my friends a party, to represent one of the pages in the magazine that is mentioned in the contents lists. So the page was not completely text

21    I then saved the cover as a JPEG image