Evaluation;

For this task I followed a brief to create a front cover and contents page for a new college magazine of my choice. I analysed the brief and broke it down into key points to follow in order to get the greatest effect from my final product.

I analysed previous students work(on their blogs) and pre-existing college magazines in order to gain perspective on what conventions needed to be present for a college magazine, I then put these conventions to use in my draft designing. I worked out a design that, in my opinion, would have most success as a magazine able for actual production.

I thought carefully about what my target audience would be and what style of language would be suitable to include. I established that as the product I was aiming to produce was a draft of a college magazine, that the audience should be college students(16-22) and also college staff and parents(22+). I chose to aim it at staff and parents in order to widen my target and because staff and parents tend to show an interest in what is going on in a students education and in their life, so the magazine acts as a monthly update into what is going on in the student community. And obviously, to the students, it informs them on upcoming events/reviews and covers articles the students want to read and be involved in.

After drafting out some layout ideas and convention specifics, I began to create my first draft of the front page. I used a digital camera to take several images of a model(following the instructions in the brief of using a Medium Close-Up shot) and chose the most accurate image that fit. I then edited the image in Adobe Photoshop CS3 on the college computers. I tweaked the models hair and face slightly but I mainly focussed on the back ground, I cropped the image so only the model remained on an empty background and transferred the image on the draft background and layout I had previously created. I placed the image where I thought it grasped most attention and worked around it. I followed key styles of colour and text; I used the Wyke College logo and text colouring for article titles and the magazine title. I also place article images in order to take up some empty space and add a greater attraction to the magazine which would entice the reader to explore the magazine.

Due to the speed of the college computers I did encounter a fair amount of problems involving the blogging website in which I posted all my work(www.blogger.com) and Photoshop, but these did not hinder my work rate to badly as I could do work at home or on Microsoft word and upload it to the internet at a later date.

I was quite pleased with the overall outcome of my final front cover and contents page but I do believe if I had managed my time more accurately and hadn’t encountered as many technological problems as I did, I could have improved on the quality of my editing and arrangements to produce a neater product.