Evaluation Of My Work

AS Media Studies

College Magazine - The Evaluation

My magazine cover follows most of the conventions of a real magazine cover such as having the masthead in large text at the top of the page, the date below the masthead on the left hand side, previews of the articles featuring in the magazine down the sides of the front cover and the barcode and price at the bottom of the cover.

I designed the masthead to be eye-catching with large, blue coloured text contrasting against the background. The wording of the masthead 'Inside Eye' is used to indicate the magazine has the inside news, the 'inside scoop'. Also, the background used is a photo off the inside of the college which relates back to the masthead. I also designed a logo for  the magazine to try and make it more visually appealing and so hopefully the logo would stick in peoples mind and make them remember my magazine over others. 

I used the subtitle 'The Wyke survival guide' beneath the masthead as a sort of slogan, which I think is breaking the conventions of normal magazines. I used it because as the target audience is students it seemed appropriate to have a casual jokey sell-line tht students could relate to.

For the article previews I used blue and purple text with a green outer glow, to make them more eye-catching. In one of the article previews I used a picture of a student smiling with the quote 'find out why this students smiling!' to try and pique readers interest and make them want to read the magazine.

The colour scheme of my magazine cover is blue, purple and green. I decided to use these colours I was influenced by Wyke colleges colour scheme of purple and green but I didn't find either of these colours to be appropriate for the masthead, I wanted a bolder colour and decided on blue and thought the three colours worked well together.

However, some of the conventions I didn't follow were a magazine issue number and having a main feature as the focus of my cover. I forgot to put in a  magazine issue number and  decided I wanted a symmetrical layout for my cover so I couldn't have a main feature advertised more than the others.

The target audience for my magazine is students and possibly teachers and students families. This is shown in the article content, with headings such as '5 Top Revision Tips', 'Essay Skills' and 'Halloween Ball'. By using a photo of a corridor inside the college as my main image it would make the magazine more familiar to readers.

My magazine represents the stereotypical image of students at college in the age group of around 16-20, with articles addressing topics you associate with students, such as revision tips, learning mentors and essay writing skills.

I tried to attract my audience by including information about upcoming social events, which is important to some students and would make others feel part of the student body by being up to date with latest events. Information about the academic side of college would attract and appeal to some students.

When I first started working on my final draft, I noticed a few problems with my original photo I was planning to use. As it was a picture of a corridor in a college there were things like light  switches on the wall and I found when I had my text positioned on the photo things like this were in inconvenient places in relation to the text and it was distracting and drew attention away from the intended focus of the cover. I fixed these blemishes by using the clone stamp tool instead of the spot fix, as the objects were quite large and spot fix didn't work very well. So using the clone stamp tool I sampled some colour from the wallpaper near the object and coloured over the objects.

I planned a draft of my final front cover on Word Document and found a font type that I originally wasn't going to use but it was perfect when I found it. But when I went to make my final product in photoshop I found the text I wanted wasn't on there. So I decided to copy the articles across from Word. I print screened the text and copied it into photoshop and used the quick selection tool to outline the text and cut out the white background that had copied over from the print screen. It was a bit of a hassle to have to do each chunk of text individually and have to reselect the inside of any letter with space inside like 'O' but it ended up looking fine.

I wanted to add an outer glow to the text and to make sure it was the same glow on each piece of text I manually entered the spread and size on the effects screen. And I used the eye drop tool to select the same shade of green as the line under the masthead so the colours on the cover were consistent.

For the picture of a student in the article preview I had to transform scale and get it to an appropriate size to put alongside the text. I had trouble at first because it wouldn't let me scale it without rasterising the image first and I wasn't sure how to do that. So I googled it and found out how, then proceeded to scale it to the right size.

Whilst sorting out the text and trying to arrange it to the layout I wanted I found it to be a hassle to keep going to select the layer I wanted to move from the side list of layers, as they all had the same sort of names and it was hard to see which was which. I found you could select a later by holding the 'control' key and clicking on the layer you want, which made arranging my images easier.