School Magazine Analysis...

Evaluation of Front Page and Contents

When deciding on the format and shape these 2 pages would take I had to call upon my expanding knowledge on magazines and the results of my questionnaire. I had to remember the rules for house style, font and images for the front cover, and make my contents page fit the front-page’s theme.

I decided to use 3 colours to go with my background image because this would allow white and black to contrast with the help of red. These were the most popular combination chosen during the questionnaire process.

The other main feature of the cover was the cover image. To analyse the image I had to look at the positives and negatives of what light it showed the school in, the model in and the magazine in. The image fits well with the cover story as it shows one of the students in front of a sign for the school cafeteria. However the image was not well planned and the picture had to flipped over to fit the magazine cover, leaving the writing on the sign back to front. The cover model wasn’t given time to prepare for the image as it was sprung on her out of the blue. So the result was her not really knowing how to pose for the picture.

The cover lines are all in the same font and style with the size and casing of the letters. This allowed the magazine to keep a sane and sensible feel to the cover even though with the full page image there is a lot going on.

One issue with the cover is the dead space that is left. In an ideal world the model would be filling up a bit more of the page filling the dead space above her head and the cover lines would fill all of the space on the left hand side of the cover.

The contents page lacked a proper design. The idea of boxes to separate the articles works in theory and the page numbers can be found at the bottom of each box. The idea of the boxes works well to separate the articles from each other but that’s about as far as the positives from this design style go. The order of the boxes was non-existent, and because of that the page becomes useless as a contents page in the normal sense.

In the music magazine, a more traditional style would better serve my magazines needs, and I’ll use less boxes, more organised information in future contents pages.

The other thing this page lacked due to the lack of images was some colour. The white background is only at it’s most effective when it has images on the page to compliment it. With more time and experience the articles could have gone with an image each to highlight exactly what was going on in each.

Other features that I missed out on include the barcode and USP on the front page. Having a free gift as a USP would have helped 3D stand out from other magazines.

In conclusion, this being my first go, I'm not downhearted by the mistakes that have been highlighted or i have seen myself, because they will help me move forward and hopefully help me improve by the time my Music Magazine is completed.