Preliminary Task: School Magazine

During the first two weeks we were seta task to design a magazine for children who attend Haydon High School.
We were able to pick our own target audience and choose what the magazine will be about.

 We were told to create a front cover and contents page for the magazine.

 I decided to pick the younger students in year 7. Younger students are more willing to buy a magazine from school as they are more interested in the secondary school life and are new to it. Therefore they would want to know the updates, puzzles, competition and things to help them through school life. First task was to draw an initial design on paper and figure out where the main image will be, the fonts, titles sub titles,taglines, barcode and price will be.  It was also a chance to establish what sort of image we wanted to feature on the front cover.

I decided to have an image of a students face in the middle showing happiness and joy. Surrounding and framing her face will be the different information and pictures of the rest of the magazine. The title will be large top right with surrounding test tubes and bubbles to make it look interesting. The colours I used matched Haydon’s school colours so it makes it relevant to school.

For the contents, as it is aimed for lower school pupils I decided to make it simple. I had different images of school life on the left and the contents on the right in straight forward yellow and black colours. Also what was highlighted at the front cover was made bigger in the contents. To make it look less plain I added the background of Hayden’s school logo.

Producing the Magazine cover and contents page was on Photoshop. I used a range of different tools including;

-Magic wand, to remove unwanted backgrounds and replace it with another.

-Text, to add text to the covers.

-Embossing and Bevel Text- to add depth to the titles.

-Fading tool- to create the background.

-Colour replacement tool.

-Distraught/Liquidfy – to warp the image to fit.

Also during my production I had changed a few things, On the front cover I removed the 'PE' tips section as it made my work too messy and crowded. I added the background to make it more professional as it looked too plain. For the Contents, I thought about my target audience so I changed 'This issue' to a more simplier 'Contents' this makes it easier for the students to read. Also Instead of having just two photos I added a couple more to highlight different parts of school and to make it look for interesting and enjoyable.

My finish product was adequate to fulfilling the task. I felt I have confident skills in Photoshop and know the basic elements of the codes and conventions in the magazine. I feel I would of benefitted if I had researched more into the codes and conventions and spend more time perfecting it. I also could have used the right fonts for both front cover and contents but unfortunately I had two different programmes of Photoshop to work on and not both had the same fonts. But overall I found I was successful in completing the project