Preliminary College Magazine Cover

I have created my first draft for my preliminary college magazine cover, in which I took photos from around the college and used them for my front cover. This was my first attempt at using Photoshop and learning the basic skills that I will evolve from to be able to complete my music magazine.

This is my evaluation of my cover:

1.What went well with photography? What could have been better?

When taking the photographs I went over to the fresher's fair that was on during the college to take photos of the stalls that were there. Unfortunately, by time I got there, it was closed and I had to work with what I had. I used blank walls for a background, and tried to use some props to make more interest. Furthermore, I used wall art for interaction, making things more relatable - especially for when adding captions. Although we had a lot of ideas, some were not executed correctly, hence having some blurry photos that we couldn't of used. It was unfortunate but we still had some that we could in fact use, and looked well took. This was mainly of people.

2. What did you learn about using the software?

I had never used Photoshop before, therefore it was a new skill I had to learn. This meant starting from the basics, and making my way up to more difficult techniques. I mainly learnt how to use layers, and how adding a new layer to each bit of my cover would be more beneficial, as it meant I could change my mistakes, rather than having them all merge and it being difficult to move around certain bits without moving others. I also dipped into the 'blending options' when adding my pictures and text. It made it much easier for text to stand out against the background (especially the title), but it also helped when I wanted some of the images to blend into the main image. Though I had many successes with learning how to use Photoshop, I still had many struggles with either remembering how to use a tool, or even just knowing how to use it. This seemed to be with tools like the crop tool, yet to over come this I just tried cropping my images outside of Photoshop to make things easier, and then placing them into a new layer later on. Something that I'd like to improve on, is definitely my blending of images into the background. This is something that I could sometimes do, yet other times it would not be as successful, and I hope to learn how to improve as I do my music magazine.

3. What do you think about what was produced?

  I believe that my cover uses simple skills due to the placing of the articles, and the colour scheme that I chose. I used mainly blues and whites for the colour scheme, because that was the background of my main focused photo, creating a blend of all the sections on the cover. Although simple, I like my cover because of it's colour scheme, I think it co-ordinates well. and I blended the images well for my amount of knowledge. I added details like the barcode and the prior logo, to make the cover more realistic. Furthermore, I added appropriate captions to the pictures to correlate and get the reader's attention, as the pictures are relevant to college life at the moment. - Something that I believe makes the cover more convincing as a college magazine. I believe it's successful for the requirements, because it uses a medium-close shot. However, my college magazine cover isn't that professional due to the simplicity of it, and how it is quite sparse. If I had further knowledge of Photoshop, I'd try blend the student reception imagine into the picture more. Moreover I need to improve on my composition of images and text, because I don't think they're perfectly placed. I also think it misses a finesse that the other college magazines I looked at had, as they usually had a running theme to the magazine to make it all link together.

4. Why did you choose to do what you did, and how much of an effect did the audience research have?

I chose to use a picture of a student smiling as my main image, because I believe that gives an impression to the audience that college is fun and friendly, and shouldn't be something to be upset about. I learned this whilst researching other college magazines, when I came across a magazine with another smiling girl on front, and it was a defining feature of the magazine. I also chose to use recent topics that have risen up within the college, as it makes the magazine more relevant and relatable to the students that may be reading. These were things like Student Union and the Year 1's finding their way around the college after their first days.