evaluation of college magazine

As media college magazine
Michaela Marson

By analysing and researching college and main stream magazines, I have managed to make a front cover of a college magazine, and a mock up on a contents page.
I will be explaining my techniques and reasons behind them.
The main conventions of a college magazine are; There is always a main image in the centre of the magazine. There is always subheadings letting the target audience know what the magazine is about and contains. I have both the main image and the subheadings around the magazine. I have related my magazine to the genre. E.g I have article-subheadings that relate to my college magazine. Magazines also have a big bold title, usually situated at the top of the magazine. This is so when it is on the magazine rack you can see the name. I have “Wyke” as my title in bold at the top left of my magazine. The colour is yellow so that it stands out. I later added a strip of yellow to the bottom this was because the title was yellow and at the top. The name is Wyke so the buyers clearly know what college this magazine is for. I have used different types of fonts and colours, this is to highlight some more important articles and break up the colours across the magazine. I also put the website www.wyke.ac.uk because most magazines have a website as well on their magazines.
For my front page I have used a variety of different styles and techniques and equipment. I used a digital camera to take all my photo’s, some of which I didn’t use for various reasons. Such as they were at the wrong angle, or the wrong scenery. For my background I used the Ash building in wyke college. I made the photo brighter by using brighten and contrast. This gave it a more focused picture. For the main title I used yellow and made it bright and bold. I used drop shadow to make sure it doesn’t blend in with the background. For the subheadings I used different fonts and mad some italic and some bold. This is to make them stand out more. I didn’t add the photo of me on until abit later, I used brightness and contrast and cut out the photo using Photoshop. To make it look more realistic I blurred the background of Ash building so it was slightly out of focus. On the mock up of the contents page I used a picture of “Wilson” building. I realised this was to bright for a background of a contents so I used the washout tool to make it less harsh. I then used an orange border, this was the same as my front page.
To make my magazine I used Photoshop to edit my photo’s and then imported them into Microsoft publisher. This is were I did the mock up of the contents and set it out into a magazine. I first used a camera to take the pictures and a blog to record everything I did. I researched using magazines from google and anylising them.
I thought it was easy to use Photoshop once I was used to were everything was. I think I used my time well in making my blog and doing work on paper as well. I looked and made various plans of my magazine and analysed before I made my magazine.