Prelim task evaluation

Evaluation 

I began the production of my college magazine front cover and contents page by gathering various images of the college itself and students within the environment. I concentrated mainly on brightly lit medium shots of students, usually holding props such as textbooks and folders. I decided to take this approach as it is conventional - in any type of magazine - to use close up or medium shots in order to capture the persons facial expression, clothing etc. This is significant because the people I have chosen represent the typical college student, therefore making the cover and contents page more appealing to it's target audience. 

I was inspired by the College Style edition of Seventeen magazine, the model comes across as ambitious and is shown to be holding a book bag. I wanted to recreate this aspirational image. I analysed an amateur front cover which contrasted hugely with Seventeen, I found the brickwork in the background interesting and decided to incorporate it in my front cover. It conveys a gritty, urban feel: this possibly makes the front cover look more masculine, simular to the amateur magazine.

Using photoshop enabled be me to increase the brightness of certain images and create more exposure, generally the pictures looked far more bold and eye catching subsequent to the use of photoshop. I also cropped the cover photo so that there was a greater focus on the students rather than the background. I feel as though overall the appearance of my front cover is successful - I like how the colour of the font is varied and vibrant yet coordinates with the Farnham College logo. This was influenced by Seventeen and is typical among a wide variety of magazines but mostly within the fashion/beauty genre. The same applies to a range of different fonts, bullet points and the use of capital letters. On the other hand a weakness of my cover would be lack of imagination regarding tag lines, I could have improved this by using puns or thinking of more exciting phrases. The cover should compel and encourage the reader, a stereotypical college magazine should require this technique especially as it is aimed towards adolescents.

I have made sure to use the same font and colour scheme in my contents page so that the magazine is consistent and thus realistic, this also gives it a memorable identity. Seemingly small elements such as website details and the college logo also contribute to the realism. I took inspiration from how the two contents page examples were laid out, however the appearance of my front cover seems bland in comparison. To improve next time I would have included some kind of background (perhaps a wide shot of the college landscape).