School Magazine

For the preliminary task i had to create a magazine front cover and contents for a school. As Little Heath already has an exsisting magazine design i decided to analyse and pick out certain key features associated with it. This enabled me to take in ideas which would help me when designing it. The main features which repeatidly occured in the 'heathsonian' magazine was the images of the school grounds. This was a key feature, by having images of Little Heath's grounds consumers can easily identify which school the magazine is focused on. This feature was something i was going to include in my design.

By researching different magazines i was influenced and realised that each independant magazine had its own housestyle. In this case Little Heath's was red, white and black. As stated i decided to include an image of the school grounds. I noticed that on many successful magazine designs that a seasonal theme had a big effect. I chose to publish my magazine at halloween, therefore i included the colour red and made the centeral image dark and gloomy.

I used photoshop to create my magazine cover. As i was new to the program i was unaware of the full capabilities and struggled with the set task. After a long thought i decided to call my magazine 'The Little Mag'. This name links with the name of the school, 'Little' also the dominant colours i chose to use were red and black, this matched the schools house style.

Photoshop was not all bad. I was able to edit the centeral image and change the colour to match the halloween theme. Also, as the magazine is aimed at students i decided to use a font which represented youth. I used a font from dafont.com which looked as if it had been hand written by a child, this was a successful feature and linked with the target audience. I decided to include some of the more important article headings on the front, this portrayed its importance and gives the reader an idea of whats inside.

Overlooking my final design there are many aspects which are similar to existing magazine designs. I used an image of the school grounds, included the badge and name of the magazine. The stated features commonly occured with exsisting school magazines. If i could change my design i would make the page layout A4 size, however as this was a first experience on photoshop i made many mistakes, but i learnt many new things and i was ready to test them out on my music magazine.