Evaluation

This is my school magazine front cover and contents page:

Overall, I think that I managed to use all the codes and conventions when designing a front cover and a contents page of a school magazine. In my magazine cover, I used a medium close-up image of a female student to relate on the theme of the magazine, as well as, attempting to add text on top of the main image with small photos along the bottom to create a sense of a real magazine. The background of the main image with some art work of other students, relates to the main story of the magazine. I chose the colour scheme of white, black and red which works together and as it also reflect to the house colour of the school. I originally used the colour blue for the selling line, because I want it to stand out on the magazine. Personally, I think that the colours goes well together, as they stand out clearly in their own ways.
The language that I used on the front cover is very simple and with no difficult words, as my target audience is all the year groups in the school.
In this project, the equipments that I used are a camera, and a computer. The software that I used is Microsoft Word. I also used Paint to delete the background of the image.
The font that I used for my masthead is Blue Highway Linocut in Microsoft Word. I attempted to add an ON symbol instead for using O, to suggest that students should be turned on in school. However, the irony to this is that the ON symbol is in red instead of green which I have forgotten to change the colour. The other font that I used throughout the whole magazine is Impact, because its easy to understand and it also goes well with the masthead font.
Furthermore, my contents page uses images with page references, which is parable to a real magazine. I did this to engage the reader to read the inside of the magazine. I still followed the house style colour of white, red and black.

To improve my design of the school magazine, I could have used Photoshop to edit and manipulate the texts and images, such as making my model block some bits of the masthead, as this is usually done in some magazines; however, I am not confident at using Photoshop because I do not know how to use it very well.
Also, for the contents page, the final design looked rush, so I could have improved this by spending more time with it by using the same font as the masthead to follow the house style of the magazine.
I could improve my skills of designing a magazine by practising and attempting to use a publisher so that I have a variety of software used, in order to publish a professional looking magazine.