School Magazine Evaluation

My magazine pages follow the simplistic conventions that are commonly found in school magazines. For example in school magazines you rarely find expert editing as it is all managed by the students. I wanted to keep it this way and I didn't want to over complicate things. I kept it as simple as I possibly could because I didn't want to break away from the norm too much. In my magazine pages I have stripped it all back and everything there is appealing. It features of the main building in school with a fade effect. I did think this was an effective feature for me to have. This was the only feature I implemented which doesn't follow the classic conventions because normally the main images are meant to be in your face, I took a risked and I'm sure it didn't back fire because my text boxes were black and my title etc, the contrast of the two colours are very easy on the eye in my opinion.

Obviously my pages are targeted at people around the school; students, teachers, governors and parents. I had to consider the target audience in every decision I made. This is why I made it so simple to read because younger students will be reading it but also older people such as parents will be reading my product so I thought to keep things plain and simple so that people on both ends of the age spectrum would find simple to comprehend. In a way I followed conventions by not making things over complicated but I also didn't follow conventions for that exact reason. Before constructing my pages I analysed a school magazine page myself in order to get to grips with what I should have included. The magazine I chose to analyse was really complex, there was a lot going on at the same time and me as the reader found it very difficult to follow. There were many colours featured as opposed to the two colours I chose for my pages. I think the way I attracted my target audience with the simple yet effective features I included such as text boxes, font size, the fade effect.


The cover especially is really clean I think there's nothing silly going on and nothing on the pages that ruin the overall presentation with the pages. My cover star is presented as the head boy of the school so I felt it was important to present him stereo-typically. I think that helped a lot. He is tall, takes pride in his appearance and the costume is presented as an immaculate uniform. I do think that helps a lot because if he is the head boy that reflects to the whole of the school. I had to present that when picking my model for my cover and it had to be a positive representation and I felt that it was. Photoshop for me wasn't a problem, I had no worries using it because I had previously used it for other assignments and I gained a lot of experience and used it for my pages. Photography was my only worry because I wasn't sure which type of shots to use and at what angles and how it would be so effective but in the end I just decided to do research and find out what was best for me and what choice I'd decide to take. Layout, text, lighting and colour scheme wasn't an issue for me at all because I knew exactly what I wanted to do after looking around at professional magazines and how I could gain inspiration from them. My only problems when doing this task was that my concentration levels were really bad and my time management skills where atrocious. But my main priority is to get all that fixed up for the main task.