Final Peliminary Task Evaluation

I have now finished my preliminary task. This task was to create a front and contents page for a magazine about our school Haydon. Throughout this blog post I will be looking and evaluating different areas of my magazine and including screenshots, also talking about individual decisions I made or didn’t make to create the final 2 pages.

Before I started my magazine I looked and studied a lot of headlines to get an idea of what I wanted and how I wanted it too look and then I finally decided on a big bold headline which said ‘THE HAYDON SPOTLIGHT’ It would have been stretching across the top of the magazine and really captivating. However, when it came to creating the final piece on in design, I had to go with a different background picture therefore the title didn’t fit anymore due to the colours clashing and it just didn’t fit. I then spoke with my teacher who showed me a GQ magazine and their logo. It really fit with my design although different with my initial first designs. I believe that the logo is subtle but also in your face. I know that may not be a real thing, but the colours compared with the actual size, shape and font of the logo really draws the reader in. I chose the font and colours because they are simple yet bold and they look very arty but professional and that was key for me in my magazine. Another reason I chose them was because I wanted something that I could use throughout my magazine and they seemed to fit best. I think that is key with the audience I have, you want to be able to really grab their attention from the second they see the magazine. I also needed a strap line for my headline, I couldn’t just leave the magazine being called ‘HS’ because I did want to incorporate my initial headline so I put it in a small strap line underneath the logo so it didn’t take away from the boldness but you could still next to the actual title.

    Moving onto the background for my magazine. I firstly wanted the school stage as my background because my magazine was based on the arts and I think that fitted quite well. Clearly that isn’t what my background is. My background is of my friend Holly. The reason I chose this was for a few reason. One of them was there wasn’t a suitable picture of the school stage that I thought looked good on my magazine. One of the more important reasons was that I chose Holly compared to the other pictures is because of the positive message that the pictures. As soon as you see Holly smiling it automatically puts you in a good mood and I want this kind of positivity to flow through my magazine and reflect on the students in Haydon that read my magazine.

  I chose to put the non-important things out of the way for example my barcode because it doesn’t really do much for the magazine so I didn’t want it blocking out the real selling points such as plug lines or pictures, so I thought it would be easier to just put the barcode out of the way.

   Moving onto the plug lines, I chose to only do the three main stories within the magazine but advertise that there were more inside. The reason I chose to do 3 because they were the most interesting and if you read that on the front cover you would be enticed and want to read inside. I also didn’t want every single plug line on the front cover cluttering up the front page. I also wanted an element of surprise, so when you open the magazine you are surprised to find a whole heap of additional stories inside. The reason I chose to position the top 2 plug lines there was so it wasn’t all bunched up and they were spread apart.

With my contents page I wanted something quite basic and something that didn’t give too much away. For the background, despite my original ideas I chose to go for a plain background that matched the colours on my front page. I also chose to not have too much going on. On my front cover it was quite busy, not overly busy, but I didn’t want to crowd my contents page as well. When choosing the fonts and colours, I knew I wanted to keep constancy throughout my magazine and not stray too far away from the original colours I chose for the front cover. Additionally when choosing the images for my stories, I wanted pictures that really reflected the stories and weren’t pictures that didn’t relate. I tried to match the pictures to the story as closely as I could. Moving on to the positioning of the stories. I wanted to alternate so moving one story to the right and another to the left, I thought this was an effective way of filling up the space and made sure there weren’t any pointless gaps.

Overall I was very happy with the outcome of my final magazine and I wouldn’t change much as I believe that instinct is key and I am very proud of my first attempt at making a magazine.