Preliminary Exercise - Evaluation

Evaluation

The aim of the task was to create a front cover and contents page for a school magazine.
To help develop my ideas I began looking at a variety of other magazines, and listed the general codes and conventions of magazine front covers and contents pages; this was useful in helping me come up with my own ideas for the task.
I created the front cover using Adobe Photoshop which I have already used in previous work, and the main image used on the cover is a medium close up of a school student; this was compulsory and the task stated that a medium close up had to be used. For the contents page I used a programme which is used by professional journalists, called QuarkXPress Passport. I have not used this programme before but found it to be very useful in my work, as it was easy to use and gave the contents page a professional look by situating text and pictures into a column structure.
The product created does not really deviate from any of the general codes and conventions of a magazine and mainly follows the basic outline. The title on the front cover contains a unique font and a masthead is also used; the main cover line anchors the meaning of the main image, and around 6 sub cover lines are also used to show inside content of the magazine. The front cover also follows the general codes and conventions by displaying a bar code, issue number, date and price, and the contents page also sticks to a 3 column structure which is used in most magazines. From completing the product I would say that my strengths were shown most when working on the contents page using QuarkXPress, as although I have previously used Adobe Photoshop, I found that the package was really simple and straightforward to use, and also think that my contents page looks more professional. I liked being more creative when working on the front cover, and feel that my skills have developed when working with Photoshop.