College Magazine Evaluation

To get an idea of the basic magazine conventions, I looked for some existing school and college magazines and analysed them using LIIAR. My initial idea (which turned out to be similar to my final design, with only a few minor changes) was to have a student sat at a desk in a college environment. I would place the cover lines around them and use the Wyke logo in my masthead. Whilst taking my photographs, I thought that they turned out quite well, but realised I could have trouble finding an appropriate colour for the text. When I came to making my front cover, I used colours from the actual photo for my text. I used the purple from the Wyke logo and the black and blue from the student’s jumper. This didn't turn out completely to plan, but most of the text is still legible and the colours give the front cover a consistent theme.

The contents page however, turned out very well. I had no trouble with text colour here and the background colours worked well in making the text legible. I took two pictures of each piece of stationary, each at a different angle, to see which I liked more. I used a mixture of the first and second images in the final draft to create a more realistic feel to how the stationary is placed on the desk. There are a few minor flaws with this contents page, though. I have a bit of carpet showing in the bottom left corner and some of the stationary wasn't edited properly, so doesn't have smooth or straight edges. As it is only a draft, I am not too concerned about these flaws because I know that they could be easily fixed if I were to publish this magazine and spend more time editing it to make it perfect.

I took many pictures for both the front cover and the contents page. For the front cover I had two main ideas of where I wanted the student to be. I either wanted to have them standing up and have a medium shot of them holding some books or a folder, or have them sat at a desk reading or writing. I took photographs of both and decided that I didn't like having the student stood, as it didn't give the impression that Wyke was a college that expected its students to work hard and achieve well. I used the desk photograph as it still allowed for a good medium shot to be used and gives the readers the impression that students at Wyke work hard, but that they still enjoy it as the student featured also looks happy. I wanted my front cover to have connotations of hard-working students who put in the effort but still enjoy themselves while doing so.

For the contents page, I wanted to have a desk background and stationary dotted around a notepad with the contents listed on it. The photographs for this came out very well, and the backgrounds were plain and easy to remove. I didn't have to rotate my images in Photoshop as I took them at different angles beforehand so that I could just place them where I wanted. The only problem with these images is that some of the edges aren't straight or completely smooth as my editing skills are still yet to improve. As I mentioned earlier, I am not too concerned about this for now as it is only a mock-up contents page, not a final design, and these flaws can easily be fixed.

I produced my magazine on Photoshop so that I could remove the backgrounds on my photographs and enhance my images to make them more appealing. I used all of my own images in my magazine, as they were easier to take than the ones used for my perfume advertisement. I liked using all of my own images as it meant that I was in control of the angles that they were taken at and didn't have to spend ages looking for the perfect one on the Internet – I could just take it myself. It also meant that I could practise using my camera more to take pictures for editing, which is something I need to do. I still had some problems with Photoshop, but not as many as before. I didn't have as much editing to do this time; it was mainly just removing backgrounds and making images larger or smaller. These are things that I am quite happy about doing and I got to practise these skills even more while making this magazine.

My target audience is for students and staff at the college. There are no other people who would be interested in reading a magazine about Wyke other than those who actually go there. Any people from outside the college probably wouldn't understand a lot of it, or know where any of the places mentioned would be. I appealed to my target audience by using familiar places in the college for my images and having stationary, textbooks and students in the photographs, which all have connotations of college, work and Wyke.

The magazines I looked at for inspiration and to get an idea of basic conventions were mainly just college and school magazines that I could find on the Internet. Looking at them helped me to decide what the readers would expect to see from my magazine and how I should go about creating that. I have used a layout that I saw on many magazines - placing the title of the magazine across the top, the main image being centred so that the cover lines can go around it, and a splash in another space to give the readers extra information about what is inside.

In conclusion, I researched existing college and school magazines to get an idea of the conventions used and gain inspiration for my own magazine. I used all of my own photographs this time, and took many to compare angles and designs and think about how they would fit with the text around them. I encountered a few problems, and my front cover and contents page are far from perfect, but they get across my main ideas of how I would want my magazine to look.

If I designed this magazine again, I would most probably keep the contents page similar to this idea, maybe just change something like layout of the stationary and I would set my student against a different background for the front cover. The problems I encountered with text colours would hopefully be resolved if I found a background that didn't have so many different colours going on, making the cover lines easier to read and more prominent.