Evaluation of school magazine

For our preliminary exercise we had to plan and create a front cover and contents page for a school magazine. I tried to make sure that my school magazine followed the codes and conventions, to do this i researched other magazines to find out what these were. After getting ideas from magazines from the same genre for example Weather Report I was able to see what my magazine would have to include and I could then go on to planning and creating my own.


When planning my school magazine, the first thing I had to do was come up with a name for the magazine, I came up with the name 'Class Time' because the codes and conventions of a front cover suggest that the title of the magazine should fit in well with the genre. I placed the masthead of my magazine across the top of the page and used a bold, unique font which follows the codes and conventions. I used a picture text cohesion on the front cover of my magazine, the colours I used match the colours used in the central image. The main coverline goes with the central image, it's in a bigger font than the other coverlines and all coverlines are in the same font. I also used a puff to premote a free gift so that it attracted more readers. However, although i followed alot of the codes and conventions there were a few that i didn't follow. I didn't used any of pictures on the front cover and although the central image does take up alot of the page i think i could have made it a little bigger so that there was less white space on the page, however i did make sure that my central image used a direct mode of adress so that the reader felt involved.


When creating the front cover for my school magazine I used Adobe Photoshop. I found this easy to use as I had used it before, the layout was simple and easy to follow which made making my front cover alot quicker to create than I thought it would. Photoshop is a very effective programme to make the front cover look professional, it's simple to edit images, text and colours.


After i had finished my front cover I started to create my contents page. I made sure that the contents page would follow most of the codes and conventions of any other contents page, particulary ones of this genre. For example, I made sure all the feature articles and regular contents were in the same font and the same size, the page numbers were in a different colour. Also, I used the words 'Contents Page' in the top left hand corner, this is so that it's clear what you're reading as the top left hand corner is the first thing people will read. I followed all of the other codes and conventions of a contents page other than; repeating the masthead on the contents page, using captions underneath the images and repeating the date and issue number again.


To create the contents page i used a programme called QuarkXPress. This was more effective to use for a contents page rather than Photoshop, as it has guidelines for the columns. At first i found it hard to use, but this was because i'd never used it before. Once i got the hang of how to use it i found it quite simple and was able to create my contents page quickly.


In conclusion, I managed to follow alot of the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover and contents page. I was able to create them quickly once I understood how to use the programmes. However, if I were to do this task again i would spend more time on the planning as my final products were not the exact same as i had planned them. I will take this into consideration when planning my main task so that this doesn't happen again.