Preliminary Task

Evaluation

For the preliminary task we had to produce the front and contents page of a school magazine, using a desktop publisher and image manipulation software. It had to include a photograph of a student in medium close and some appropriate text and a masthead.

I wanted to aim the magazine at a wide audience and make it appropriate for the whole school so I had to use a style that would appeal to all ages. Therefore I made it very simplistic, using simple shapes and fonts and made everything stand out with simple colours. But it would also have to look smart and professional to appeal to parents of the students, I made sure this was shown on the front page and contents page to show cohesion. I called it HGS News as the magazine contains news and information about the school.

The first thing I did was take the photos, so I could build the magazine around the images. I manipulated the photos I took on Adobe Photoshop CS to brighten them and remove and smudges or marks on them. When I had the images I could make up articles to accompany them, for example the photo of the student in the gate goes with an article about the gate, this would mainly appeal to sixth formers, but the quality of the image would make the cover look more professional. Once the images and text were on the page the next thing to do is create a suitable background. To do this I used simple shapes to frame the images and text. The white borders I used stand out against the red and the gradient on the contents makes the background more exciting than just plain red. This is simple but effective and means the background doesn’t draw attention from the text.

I am very happy with how the front page turned out. The images used look good especially because of how I edited them, for example I darkened one section of the main image so the text could be read. The simple layout makes it easy to read and understand. There is just enough information so that the page is not cluttered. Plus the masthead has a different font to the subheadings which makes it stand out more. One of the problems with the front page is the name, I could not think of an appropriate name so I went for the obvious and quite boring HGS news. I like the layout of the contents page but I don’t like the large white box that surrounds the contents. I don’t think it really fits in with the front cover, so there is not much cohesion. Also the star at the bottom was just added to take up space, and I don’t think it looks very good.

Overall I think my front cover turned out very good all the images and text are aligned so it looks professional, and I think it would appeal to my target audience. T he contents page could do with more work, I didn’t spend quite as much time on this and probably made some wrong choices. As I went through the process I learnt how to use Photoshop affectively and to achieve the best results and that editing images can be hard and is much easier if you are familiar with the software. I also learnt a lot about Microsoft Office Publisher and how to produce publications that look professional, one problem that arose with publisher was the white borders it automatically left, this meant I had to trim it down which meant the magazine was no longer A4. If I did this again I would learn how to get past such problems so my end product would look better and more professional.