Evaluation of my College Magazine

Evaluation of my college magazine

When creating my college magazine I researched the conventions of a regular magazine and based my project on this. I used several conventions such as a main heading which in my case was the title of the magazine ‘Priestley Plunge’. I used a casual non serif font when creating my title as I felt that it suited my target audience which was year 11 students more. I thought that it was important to make sure the magazine front cover didn’t look too serious and formal as this would make it less appealing to the generation my magazine was aimed at.

I added the slogan ‘take the dive into college life’ because I thought that it was a nice way to welcome the audience into reading my magazine and it would make them feel better and interest them in the magazine more. Also it would make the magazine more memorable as it is something different that not all magazines have. I added a price at the top, I made my price only £1.99 as my target audience were only in year 11 and from my research students of this age don’t usually have that much money and don’t often buy many magazines of this sort so by making it quite cheap it would make them want to buy it more.

I used several advertisements of the content on my front cover. I did this by taking my own images of around the college and people in it. I edited these images using Photoshop; I applied several effects such as drop shadows, making the images slightly transparent and many more. This allowed me to make the images better suited to my magazine and made them my own. I had a running theme for the front cover of my magazine, I used a blue colour as the basis for most of the front cover, and I chose to do this because I felt it linked in with Priestley College and worked well with the purpose of my magazine.

I used a medium close up on the front of my magazine, I used an image of Joel and cropped and took out any access bits of the picture I didn’t need. Once again I used Photoshop to do this. Also on my front cover I used bigger fonts to advertise free vouchers in my magazine which makes people want to read it more and make it stand out more.

On my contents page I did similar research and looked at the conventions of a contents page. I used this to create my own.

When creating my contents page I used an existing magazine as an inspiration and also followed the conventions I had already researched. I put the name of the magazine at the top of the page in a very large and bold font to make sure that it stood out from the rest of the page.

I had smaller images all around the page that I had taken specifically to match my features that I was including in my magazine, I edited the pictures on Photoshop and made them rounded on one edge and added the page number in the corner. I had some trouble using Photoshop as I was new to it and didn’t know how to do several things, once I got used to using it I found it very useful and it helped me to create a successful college magazine contents page and front cover. I also used other effects on Photoshop and I added shadows, made images look 3D, changed the colour scale of images and a lot of others. Using Photoshop helped me to make my images more suited to me and made them exactly how I wanted them.

I used sub headings and larger fonts for each of the features and then smaller fonts for the details of the features to follow with the conventions that I had researched. I had some trouble adding all the page numbers to the corner of the images and making all the fonts and colours the same which made it very hard for me. I got frustrated and wanted to give up several times whilst making my magazine contents page however I researched properly how to use Photoshop and got some help with using it which helped me a lot in creating my magazine exactly how I wanted it.

Overall the college magazine went well however some of the images didn’t go exactly how I wanted them because of some of the effects I attempted to use didn’t go to plan but in conclusion I feel like I did well to experiment with new media technologies and create a magazine front cover and contents page for the first time.