Evaluation

Overall I feel that my Preliminary assessment went well.

I created a survey for people to complete on what types of things they
dislike and like on magazine covers. This information helped me as I had
more of an understanding of my target audience. It also made my initial
design much easier to make as I had direct feedback on what things to
include and not include, like colour schemes, content, etc...
Analysing cover and contents pages helped my get a more detailed
understanding of how they are laid out, and what types of things the
cover and contain. I had ideas of the type of things I wanted to connote
and denote through my magazine cover and contents pages, and seeing
lots of different examples of contents and cover pages helped my decide
how to complete this. My dominant ideologies were happy college
students. I represented this by having my main image of a college
student, on college ground smiling and looking happy. I steered away from
using a stereotypical college student (grumpy and hates college) because
I feel that if the picture on the front of my magazine cover was of
someone looking bored and unhappy, my target audience would not want
to buy my magazine as it suggests that it is boring.
The uses and gratification theory suggests that most students use the
magazine to gratify their needs for information, which means that when
planning my cove, I had to make it obvious that my magazine wold be a
source of information.
Planning my magazine was an important part of the process as it was the
first time I could physically look at my ideas on paper, and easily identify
what was good and what needed changing. I designed two different
magazine covers and also two different contents pages. I designed two
different drafts of each that were very different so that I could then
compare the two, and get others opinions on which they prefer. However,
there were aspects in both of my contents page designs that everyone
liked, so I decided to incorporate both ideas into my final contents page
design. This ensured that my final design would be the best it could be.
Once I had decided, I then drew out my final designs in more detail to
make my production of the pages easier.
I used Photoshop to edit my initial image that I would be using on my front
cover. This made my image clearer and of a better quality as I edited the
colour contrast and gradient to make it more suitable to be viewed as an
A4 size. I also used Photoshop to put the masthead behind the head of the
person in my main picture. I did this because my researched told me that
the majority of magazine covers have their masthead behind the cover
persons head, and I wanted to replicate this to make my cover look as
professional as possible.

I then used InDesign to put the writing on both my cover page and
contents page. At first I found it quite difficult to use as I have never had
to use it before, so it took me quite a while to get used to. However, once I
got used to it, I could design my pages quickly and efficiently.
One problem that I came across is that if I followed my drawn design
exactly, my pages did not look as effective. This is probably due to the
fact that my drawn idea was not 100% accurately proportional, so when it
was on the computer screen, did not look right. I overcame this by slightly
changing the size, font and placing of the text to make it more similar to a
professional magazine.
Once finished, I also decided that my contents page was not entirely
interesting to look at. To make it more interesting, I could have used more
colours of different text fonts. I will take my mistakes into account when
design my main task to ensure that I can design the best possible
magazine cover, contents page and two page spread.