For our AS Media course we have been told to design and create a new music magazine with two double page spreads. In our first 3 lessons we were told about the elements of the course and were introduced to photoshop. The coursework is worth 50% in our AS year and we have been told that we have to blog our progress throughout the course and to have word documents to back up our work. Our preliminary task was to create a front cover and contents page using Photoshop for our college magazine, 'Zine'.To the left, you can see my finished preliminary product. “Zine” Magazine Front Cover & Contents Page Evaluation
The target audience for my design of the “Zine” magazine front cover is for teen boys who attend Woking College. I have shown this by using a fun fresh and original font which is eye catching and isn’t plain as well as a multi tonal blue background which is attractive and stands out. I chose the colour blue as it is a masculine colour and is usually associated with males. However, I smudged the centre of the background into a lighter colour to create a light baby blue which is a feminine, in case teenage girls were interested in the magazine. This would help make the magazine
successful as the bright colours and imaginative font will draw the reader in. The writing on the front cover is informal, so this will encourage teenagers to read the magazine as the can relate to how it’s written as they will use the same type of language in their everyday vocabulary.
I have learnt that “Photoshop” is a very difficult programme to work as there are lots of confusing and new devices. I struggled with ‘‘Photoshop’’ as it was new to me and was very time consuming. However, I learnt that you could change the colour of people’s eyes, and even make their hair shiny. It is a very useful programme to edit photos with in order to make them fit in with your work and appear more appealing. I brightened and changed the colour of the model’s eyes on my main image, which was a boy to attract a male audience. This was to make them stand out. I also, lightened up the skin to eliminate shadows and covered a blemish using the tool, ‘‘Airbrush’’.
In my main task, I will include more images on the front cover to make it stand out more compared to other magazines. My contents page lacked images and text so next time i will add more to make it more eye catching and take pictures in a variety of shots. I will also make the main image cover most of the page to fill up space and to add more colour to the page and so that the audience can see the main feature clearly.
My contents page had the same background as my front cover as I wanted them to match. I wrote the contents’ text in the middle of the page as I wanted the reader to focus on the writing. My draft was drastically different to the end result as I originally based my magazine to be for teenage girls but the images I took were not sufficient as they were all blurry and didnt really suite the look which i was going for. Below you can see my plans for my original Zine front cover and contents page:
