Magazine Evaluation

In order to do this project, I had to undertake a lot of research, particularly into the conventions of a magazine cover. I had to analyze a number of existing magazine covers and see how they were related in terms of language, ideology, institution, audience and representation. I also carried out research into which programs I could possibly use for my project and what the advantages and disadvantages were.

After the research, I had to plan my project accordingly, and I referred back to my research in the planning stages of my magazine. I produced a mind map which was were most of the ideas for my magazine came from. On here, I planned my magazine using LIIAR. Once I had a clear idea of what I wanted my cover to look like and what was going to be on it, I did a layout draft, before drawing out a mock up of my final design. Finally, I had to go out and take the pictures which I would need for my final design. These included a medium close up of a student. Once I was happy that I had a good idea, I moved onto actually designing the cover.

For my college magazine cover, I decided to use Adobe Photoshop CS4. The advantage of this was that it allowed me to arrange all of my work into layers. For this particular project, I had about twenty layers, all of which were either text, pictures or shapes. In addition, Photoshop allowed me to produce a cover which looked professional, and I would not have achieved this if I had used Photoshop I had a main image of a student in medium close up, which I cut out. The advantage of cutting it out was that I could place him over the title of the magazine, and other various items on the page. This made him stand out from the page. This was something I picked up from doing the research, as I noticed that most magazines do this. I then had three other images which I took myself, of places around the college, or that were associated with the stories in my magazine.

Overall, I think the final outcome was successful. This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, everything stands out on the page. This is especially true for the picture of the student. Secondly, it has all the features of a typical magazine cover, including a main title, main picture, appropriate headlines and a barcode. The layout of it is also quite similar to some of the ones I analyzed whilst doing my research, so therefore, it shows my research was effective. Finally, in terms of representation, it actually looks like a college magazine.

There are a number of different things I could do to improve my college magazine cover. Firstly, I could add a banner to the top of the magazine, as this is a feature a lot of magazines have. Secondly, I could do something more creative with the other images, such as add a border, or make them into different shapes. I could also space them out throughout the page. However, as this is my first attempt at creating a magazine cover, I think I’ve created something that looks quite professional.