Evaluation

For the premlinary exercise I was asked to create a cover for a new college magazine, and also a draft of the contents page. The first thing I did was research three different college magazines so that I had a good idea what different things I would need to include on my front cover. Once I had done this, I began to gather together some ideas starting with a LIIAR analysis of my college magazine, then going on to ideas for the actual cover itself. I started off thinking about name ideas and the colour scheme and then developing further to the photo I would include, for example what the student would be wearing and where the photo would be taken. Finally, I thought about the font styles used and what would actually be written on my magazine cover.
Once I had completed my thought process I began drafting the placement of everything on Publisher. I did this before I did my photoshop draft and final draft as it gives me a good idea of how I could fit everything on without going to all the effort of making the full thing numerous times. Once I'd got the placement of things as I liked it I began drafting my ideas onto photoshop, using the colour schemes, fonts and photo that I wanted. I then gathered up all the unused photos and explained why I didn't use them.
For my final magazine cover I decided to use purple and green as the colour scheme because these are Wykes college colours so it will be recognisable to the students when they see the magazine. I also used a bit of black in my colour scheme to break up the purple and green a bit. I used the same font for the masthead that I used in my photoshop draft as it was very bold and noticable and I liked that about it. Although, I decided not to use the shadow effect as, in my opinion it was a bit too much and un-needed. I decided to change the headline font to "Trebuchet MS" as it just varies the font style a bit and I also made the worls quite big to fill the space. Another thing I did was that I moved the words "3rd Legendary Halloween Party" from the banner at the bottom and put it with the other headlines as that allowed me to have more space for the web address and a Wyke logo to be placed there. The photo I took for my magazine was of a student that attends Wyke college looking casual (ie, wearing a jumper/casual clothing, not looking like they're on a night out) with a folder to make them more recognisable as a student.
Overall I think I fulfilled the requirements as I thought about the idealogy of a college magazine and by using that made it appeal to the studens by using a student as a model and using headlines that would appeal to the students. Next time I think I would put more thought into what I would include on the cover as I left things out such as a sell line and puffs. Also I would think more about the model and have them do more interesting poses as that would make the magazine more individual, therefore in theory it should sell better.