School Magazine - Evaluation

When making my school magazine, as my priliminary task, i followed a brief. This brief was to make a school magazine cover and a contents page with a selection of pictures and text's to be on it. The audience was for the parents of the students and students themselves to see what had been going on in the school month.

Before starting, i conducted some research. I firstly went on google images and found a range of different school magazine covers so i could get an idea of what was already out there and what they looked like.  I used a couple of these to make make a poster with my media class. We stuck a few onto a big sheet of paper and wrote down the good points and bad points about each one. This helped me to get an idea of what i should and shouldnt do in my own magazine.

Next, i created two different word documents; one for a plan of my magazine cover and the other of a plan for my contents page. These were basic outlines and texts to show where everything was going and what i was going to include on them. This helped me greatly when making the actual cover and contents. This also got me into taking photos to be used on them and deciding exactly what stories i wanted to use on the magazine.

The next stage was making them on a programme called Pages. I used a colour scheme of blue, green, yellow and white (as they are in the school's logo) and red for the title to make it bold for the audience clearly see what the magazine was called. I added the images that i had taken and completed my cover page and contents page with the use of the plans i had done previously. The main problem that i came across was that I thought I was using too many colours, so i made sure to put an almost equal amount of each colours on the pages so they wouldn't look too crowded with colour. I managed to make the two pages look like a set with the use of the same texts and some pictures as well as the colour scheme used.

To find out what other people thought of my cover and contents pages, I asked for some feedback from a person from my media class, to see from a students point of view, and my mother, to see from a parents point of view. My classmate liked the use of the colours and pictures used as they were thought to be a good combination, however some unimportant parts , such as part of a picture, seemed to stand out and made the page look overpowering. My mum said that she loved the different fonts i used and the story headlines, she thought them to be interesting and made her want to read them. On the other hand, she thought there was a little too much white and made some of it look unfilled.
I will be using this feedback i have collected if i need to improve my school magazine at a later date.