Review and Feed back on Preliminary task

Once I had completed my school magazine cover I had a number of compliments as well as a number of different pieces of  constructive criticism; here is what my reviewers had to say about my design:

Christopher Sande said, "The Front cover is a good design I can see you have kept a consistent house style, I like how you have layered the text behind the head following typical conventions of school magazines; I also like the advertisement strip at the bottom of the design I see you have attempted to follow key conventions that magazines in general follow well done."

he went on to say "although I feel more information needs to be added to the design as a whole as I feel there is a lot of vacant space that could be used, also you need to bear in mind the quality of the image you are using has a large impact on the design as a whole."

he then said "As for the Contents page I can see why you have kept the design simple as most contents pages are very simplistic compared to the front cover as they have two separate objectives, but what doesn’t work in this part of the design is the colour scheme the Green doesn’t work and is a random choice of colour; to an extent it makes it look as if it’s not from the same magazine in future keep the simplicity in the design for a contents page but remember to follow the general colour scheme of the design as a whole but overall well done"

After I had listened to what my first reviewer had to say I went on to collect more reviews so I asked Mahdi Maah his views.

Mahdi Maah said, "looking at the design as a whole I personally don’t like the design and the reason why I say this is because the colour scheme in places is random and most magazine covers are uniform in terms of the colour scheme otherwise the layout and the use of key conventions such as the advertising strip at the bottom makes the design good, another thing to bear in mind Jerome is the use of font try experimenting with different font as it will give a different effect."

Taking what Mahdi Said into account I then asked a third reviewer

 Connor McCormack said, " I do think the design is good both front and back are both good but the colour scheme needs to be closer, because they look like two completely different pages from two completely different magazine but in future remember to keep a close scheme of colour and in closer relation from page to page and in future use the same ideas of having prizes featured and different adverts well done and this will be a good learning curve for you I can’t wait to see your next design"

Preliminary Task

This week I produced a front cover and contents page for a school magazine I will talk about the front cover first, initially I had done some research into the layout of school magazines and the key signifiers that make a school magazine different from other magazines.

From my research I found that school magazines have a very natural image displayed as the main image rather than having a studio image as you would see in a commercial magazine such as "Read Me" the use of lighting in school magazines is natural whereas commercial magazines use a mixture of high key lighting to give a professional appearance.

A school magazines also use high quality images but not in the same way other magazines do a school magazine will use a high quality photo so natural features where as other magazines use them to exaggerate features.

School magazines also tend to use an array of colours to keep the reader interested in the page as school magazines tend not to have too many interesting stories where as a women’s magazine will have a larger variety of interesting stories the reader is itching to read about.

the title of magazines tents to be partly hidden by the model in the main image and this is no exception when it comes to school magazines, in carrying out this preliminary task I have learnt and understood the different signifiers and key elements used in different magazines and school magazines in particular.

a school magazine has a wide spectrum for a target audience being a school magazine its natural target audience will be students and parents/cares but bear in mind the fact that parents are more than just parents they could be young older, upper or working class therefore the use of colour has to include a variety to not only engage parents but students as well.

The contents pages of school magazines tent to be more complex in layout which is why the layout of this page is vastly different to the front cover I created both the front cover and contents page in conjunction with each other and as I have stated before in doing so has widened my perspective of school magazines and magazines in general as a whole all aspects of the page are cleverly layer out to draw the readers eyes to different sections of the page.

In my case I have added the stripes to draw the reader’s eyes to the information on the contents page.
In conclusion I have enjoyed doing this task as I have learnt a lot form it and I will be producing more in the future one to improve my skills and overall knowledge and two, because I’ve enjoyed it.