School Magazine Evaluation

Front Cover

• 3 Colour Scheme - orange,white,blue
• Large title
• Large Photograph
• What's Inside
• School Logo in Top Corner
• Issue
• Imformal Language

For my research I look at a school magazine called 'Chill'. Many of the conventions of this magazine stood out and I was able to modify them and use them in my planning and ideas. This magazine contain a large title, which I used on my magazine however I change the font and style to fit my magazine genre. I also noticed they put the scholo logo in the top right-hand corner. i ended up putting my logo in the same corner as it seemed to fit best there. I did however change the opacity of the image so it blended in more with the background unless you paid special attention to it. I continued the theme of informal language as it seemed best for this type of magazine which was seen by a younger age group. I also kept to a 3 colour scheme as it worked well for 'Chill' however I did brighten the colour up as this magazine was designed for children. I used a large imagine in my magazine which they didnt use for 'Chill'. I didnt think for a high school magazine there should lots of small photos so I changed this convention to fit my magazine.

Contents

• Large Title
• Small Photos
• Page Numbers and their Contents
• 3 Colour Scheme - orange, white, blue

The contents page for 'Chill' was quite cluttered with a lot of writing. I didnt think this worked for a school magazine as childrens attention spans are short. It was unecessary writing. So I changed this convention by only having a few page titles and what the artile contained instead of a lot of writing. My research magazine only contained one photo on the contents page. Again for a high school magazine I though more photos could capture my audiences attention more, therefore I added a couple more photos in my last 3rd section. I did however keep to the convention of page numbers as its not something you can easily get around if you change it. I also kept to the 3 colour scheme but again I changed the colours to orange, white and blue to brighten my contents page up.

What did I learn?
This preliminary task helped me to improve and practice all the skills I had learnt. It also opened my eyes up to how a magazine needs to be thoroughly planned. I had to take a medium - close up shot of a student in any background I wished. I learnt a couple of things from just this shot. Firstly as it isnt a full close up you can see more of what the student is wearing, so mise en scene came into play as I had to dress my model. Also with it being a medium - close up, the camera doesn't have to be right infront of their faces. For example, if I put the camera onto the manual setting, I could adjust the zoom lense and the focus lense till I got the shot I wanted without having to be physically close to the student. I used natural light for my photographs because this is a school magazine not a professional magazine, therefore a common convention of school magazine was to have natual light instead of articficle light.

I constructed my magazine using a program called photoshop. In this I was able to adjust and modify my photos and create my magazine pages. I was able to layer my magazine, which made it capable of changing a small detail without messing the rest of the page up. Eg moving a picture. I also used effect such as a Gaussian Blur, which created a shadow behind a word, making it stand out from the page. I used the effect alot as I thought it created a nice look to my writing. The tools I used included one called the 'magic wand'. This allowed me to be able to remove an unwanted background colour from my logo, so it left just the logo outline. I also used a tool called the 'healing tool' which allowed me to get rid of a few spots from my models face, as it takes the pixels from the area surrounding the blemish and copies and pastes them over the top of the spot.