Preliminary task!

At the beginning of the Media course (September 2010) we did our Preliminary task. This was our first taste of creating our own school magazine, learning how to use Photoshop and learning about lighting and camera angle to get the photo we wanted.
Front Cover

This was my front cover. It has everything most magazines have... a masthead, a graphic which is a cut out and it's angle of gaze, the date, the price, pull quotes, plugs, teasers, puff-words.
Even with all these things that most magazines have this isn't an amazing piece of work. I was new to photoshop and to trying to take a good photo with good lighting and angle.
You can tell that the photo has been cut out because the edges of it are really flat and cornered and the colour of the background is very plan and bold. The graphic also doesn't take up most of the page and the writing and background colour seem to stand out more then the graphic itself.
All the text is very similar and plan and from first glance you wouldn't realise that it is a school magazine.
Thing that I could do to help improve is use photoshop more, get use to its tools and all the different techniques and also practise taking pictures with different lighting and angles.
I also think if I plan it out better and spend a bit more time on it I will deffinately be able to improve.





Contents page

My contents page is very plain and boring. The colours are very plain and bold. There aren't many photos on the contents page and you would never be able to tell that it is a school magazine. The font is very boring and the layout isn't well though out. I think I can improve my contents page when doing my music magazine but planning it out better, planning out the colours and photo, take more pictures for it and to mess around with different writings and fonts.

Maybe when  doing my contents instead of just plain colums of writing saying whats on each page I can highlights specials or important things in the magazine and maybe have another main image like on the frontcover and mix the colours up a bit but not too much, the contents page is pretty much identicle to the frontcover apart from the fact that the images and writing are different so when doing my new one I would like to mkix it up a little, give the frontcover and contents page there own unique twists but to still share the feel of the magazine all the way through from the frontcover to the double spread.