Preliminary Task Magazine Cover

I worked with Paul Briggs, and we managed the task between us by each making a basic magazine cover and putting them together, we both took a number of pictures, so that we had a decent spectrum of pictures to choose from, which helps as it shows that we can select the best pictures to use for our magazine so that it can look as good as possible.

We used the school website and newsletters as inspiration, but added our own personal touches to improve the basic school format, such as an updated logo appealing to a more teenage audience with a bright cyan colour and black stripes contrasting on the school emblem.

We used computers with Adobe Photoshop to complete this task, as Photoshop has all of the tools needed to create a magazine cover, such as layers, effects, and the range of photo editing tools that can be used to do a variety of things to make the magazine cover pictures and text look the best that they can.

When planning, we had to take into account the audience and what information would be needed to be used, during shooting the pictures we took into account the relevancy of the pictures in contrast to the information on the page, and whilst editing we took into account the rule of three colours and three fonts, and also we took into account the basic layout of a magazine cover, that can be used to make our magazine look very professional and publishable.

I believe the consistency of the magazine layout worked well, as all font styles and layout colours were the same from both the magazine cover and contents page, and use the traditional basic magazine layout, where the masthead is on the top of the cover to keep a very simplistic but effective layout. We kept the colour palette to the school colours theme with turquoise and black fonts, and with cyan, yellow and white as a background colour to contrast the text on the page so it stands out effectively. The colour palette appeals to a teenage audience as it uses bold and bright colours, whilst still using dull colours to show the more adult like and professional look, which shows sensibility and practicality as the text contrasts well with background images and background colours.
If we had more time/ another chance to do this I believe we would use a variety of different Photoshop tools to make our magazine cover work a lot smoother, as the colours scheme is very block coloured. Also we could have taken more pictures, to have a larger variety of options for the front cover and therefore improving the overall look of the magazine/

From completing this task, I have learnt a variety of things, mostly how to use Photoshop tools effectively and have improved on using the magnetic lasso tool, which in future will help me with other picture related work. I also have learnt further aspects of magazine covers such as the placement of pictures, and text on the page to be effective and follow traditional magazine layouts.