Preliminary Task

As a preliminary task, I have created a front cover and contents page for a college magazine. In order to do this I first made a plan with ideas for a masthead and sell lines and then took my own photos around the college of features I would like to include. I then created a mock up of a front cover and contents page using Photoshop and had this marked by my teacher.

To create these I used Photoshop and used a combination of my own original images, and a few found online such as the ski slop and shop logos. I stuck to a colour palette of reds and greys so there was a consistent house style and tried to make these look as professional as possible.

I was awarded a grade A from my teacher for this task, as the layout and colour scheme are effective making it look professional, as well as the image and cover lines being appropriate to the target audience of college students. This is because all of my articles are relevant to what goes on inside the college and my model is of the target age group herself. The positive comments of my contents page were that the layout is easy to navigate by the clear page numbers anchoring the images, and this is aesthetically pleasing. I will aim to achieve the same grade in my final product.

Areas for improvement which were highlighted was the quality and cutting out of my main image which is something I will take much better care with in my final product as the camera used was not of amazing quality and I didn't spend too much time editing the image for this piece. Another thing was that the sell lines on my front cover seem to blend into one and I have picked up myself on the fact that there is blank space on the right but not on the left which is something I will change in future too. The final comment was that the script font used on both pages is slightly unclear for the audience and to improve this I will choose a more simple style which can be read at a glance to ensure that my magazine is accessible to everyone.