Preliminary Task

This is the college magazine cover that I have done for my preliminary task. I chose the colour scheme blue and orange to match the St Mary's logo and also I feel that these colours will appeal to both boy and girl students, so more people would buy the magazine rather than only targeting a small group of people. As well as using the St Mary's logo and colour scheme I have also used the initials, 'SMC' in the magazine name. This is because I think it gives the magazine an identity that the target audience will recognise easily. I have used a masthead so that it is clear straight away that this is a magazine, and I think that because the masthead is bright orange on top of dark blue it is eye catching and likely to make people stop and read it. I used a strapline on my magazine cover to give the reader an idea of what the magazine will include. However I have kept it short so it doesn't give too much away. I think this will make the readers want to find out more. One thing I was quite worried about when I was making my magazine was cutting out my image for the front page on Photoshop as I didn't think I would be able to make it look professional. But I think that I did quite well with this and that the image fits well on my front page, and doesn't look like it has been cut out.

Although I am quite happy with the result there are a few things I would change if I could do the task again. I think that the colours of my magazine cover could have been more striking, so it would catch the target audience's eye. As the magazine is aimed at students, I think they might find the dark colours a little bit boring and brighter colours could have been more exciting, so I will consider this when making my music magazine cover. I also think that there may be a bit too much empty space on the front cover, and when I was making it I had trouble thinking how I could fill it without making the page look crowded. I think I could have solved this by planning out my layout properly before choosing my image for the front page, so that I could make sure it would look good. If I could do the magazine again I would also vary the font more, because I realise that it looks a little bit repetitive and not enough variety. 

This is the design I made for my contents page of the college magazine. I like the title 'This month...' rather than just writing 'contents' because I think it gives a more relaxed and informal feel to the magazine. However I was not too happy with the layout, because I do not think it looks very interesting with just the page numbers written down one side, and pictures on the other. I will make sure I think about this when I am making my contents page for my music magazine.After this task I feel a lot more confident using Indesign and Photoshop, because before this I didn't know much about either of those programs. This has helped me a lot with my final project because I have had to think a lot about what would appeal to students, and in my music magazine I will probably be targeting the same age range.