Magazine Evaluation

After finishing the front cover and the contents page, the things I thought went well were the planning that I had done, which made the production stage smoother and easier to do, as I didn't have to think of different ideas so it wasn't a struggle.

The strengths I had throughout this project was that I knew what kind of photos I wanted, and the colour pallette I was going to use. As me and Becca were in a pair for photo taking, another strength was that we didn't mess around whilst taking photos so that gave us more time to get on photoshop and start editing. I thought that I had a basic idea on how to use photoshop as I'd used it in art, so that was better than starting from scratch.
Another strength I found that I had was after Mr Smith tought me how to use the magnetic lassoo, it was a lot easier to cut out the images of Becca and it looked really neat. I thought everything went well but one of the weaknesses was that I didn't have any immediate ideas when I was planning so that used up a lesson, but eventually I had more ideas and then my initial ideas came together.

A flaw in the making of this was that I was ill for the final lesson of doing our contents/front cover, so that is why the work is in late because I dont have photoshop at home.

Overall I reckon the whole task went quite well and nothing went drastically wrong :)

Magazine Production

For the production of my magazine I had to firstly get the photos I needed of Becca, so firstly we had to find somewhere to take the photos ( I was Becca's model) which wasn't hard because we needed a white background so we took them outside and in the new canteen, Becca was doing a maths magazine called 'geek' hence why i was in the glasses.

I took about ten shots of Becca, vice versa, which didn't take long as we took around ten shots of each other before we decided we had the variety we needed.

I then uploaded the photos onto a computer in the classroom, then decided which one I wanted for my cover and started to edit it on photoshop. The photo that I decided to use for my cover was the one below of Becca looking like she was doing a mime, you wouldn't look at it and automatically think 'drama' but if the cover gave it all away you wouldnt want to read more. I also chose it because the specifcation was that we had to have a mid shot of somebody for our front cover and this was one of the only mid shots I got, I decided to use one of the pictures of Becca jumping for my contents page.

I started by cutting around Becca using the lasso tool, which took about a billion years because the computers in there are very slow. I wasn't pleased with my final cut out of Becca because it looked a bit sketchy and a bit of her head was missing where I'd gone wrong, which I wasn't really pleased with because nobody wants to buy a magazine with the model on the front who has a bit of her head missing. Then Mr Smith showed me the magnetic lasso tool which was a lot easier because it found the outline of Becca and it made it look a lot smoother.

I then had to choose my font for the title. I chose a font that I cant remember the name of but it looks a lot like this one, because it is dramatic and that is the theme of the  magazine. The colour palette I chose of the text for the cover was the same blue of the cardigan Becca was wearing. I thought it was important to chose the same blue as it made the magazine cover have a theme, rather than me chosing three different colours as well as becca being in blue, it could have looked a bit messy and not actually thought into that much, white ( as i'd given the cover a black background ) and a bright peach colour. I achieved the same blue as Becca's cardigan by Mr Smith showing me how to use the pipette tool on photoshop. I used contrasting colours ( white on the black, blue with peach, white with peach) next to each other so it would be easier for the reader to see what I wanted to stand out. I found it easy working out how to use the layers and how to move things around so that sped things up a bit, I had some basic idea on how to use photoshop from doing art at gcse, but that was more editing photos and scanning things in so not really the same sort of area, I think i did okay for a first attempt at making a magazine cover though :)

Magazine Pre Production

The task we were given was to design our own school magazine cover and contents page, the magazine's target audience is people at our school (age 14-18). In preparation for this task we had to bring a magazine to the lesson, and look at the way the front page and contents page were set out to give us some idea on the layouts of magazines. For inspiration I went on sites such as Vogue, Elle, Grazia and NME. The covers that caught my attention the most were these ones below from Vogue. I like them because they use strong colours,  eye catching pictures on the front and I am interested in what they are wearing. My favorite one is the one of Agyness Deyn ( middle row on the left ) because of the colour palette and the word 'dazzle' caught my attention.

Obviously I wont have a model on the front of my school magazine because its a school magazine and thats not going to get the attention from all of my target audience and I don't have the money. The ideas i did get from these covers was the bright colours, especially the contrasting colours of the cover on the first row on the left because they aren't two colours you'd put together but they work. They catch people's eyes and make them want to read on, to I kept that in mind. I then had to decide if I was going to do a general magazine or focus on a specific subject, I couldn't think of a name so i decided to choose drama because its a subject I do and you can do more with it, as I reckon a drama magazine about shows and actors sounds better and would interest my target market more than an English magazine about books and writing. I decided to call my magazine 'DramaRama' because it says what subject it is and you'd know straight away if you are interested in it. It doesn't sound deadly serious but I know that at our age, as a school magazine you dont want something deadly serious and a bit heavy to read. I know that not everybody in the school reads the school magazine, I for example haven't read our school magazine so by targeting a specific subject the people that are likely to read this are people who are interested in drama. Drama isn't a subject that is entirely serious, whereas maths and science is. In my opinion you can have fun in Drama, and I wanted my magazine to portray that. This was the mock up of what I basically wanted my magazine to look like (picture above). I already knew I was going to use Becca as my model at this point so that was one less decision I had to make during the production, because the more decisions I made before I wouldn't have to make in the production which would make it smoother and easier.