AS Preliminary Magazine Task

Production: We took photos that we had planned in our mock-ups, and then we imported them to Photoshop and began editing. We then had to cut out these photos and add it onto the base of our magazine. We then proceeded to add a masthead and cover lines according to our mock-ups. I wasn't really sure what fonts I wanted to use, but I knew that I wanted them to be bold and eye catching, also i wanted the fonts to link to the 'geek' aspect of the magazine by keeping the fonts striaght forward and not particularly edgy or interesting. We were allowed 3 different fonts, so for the title I went for a simple obvious font to make it stand out. For the cover lines, I wanted a less bold, but still easily readable font, so I chose a more subtle font, yet kept it simple. For the competition cover line, I used a slightly more interesting font because I thought this would advertise the competition better and be more eye catching to the reader. Although I had originally planned to keep the colour scheme to greys and blacks, I soon realised this would look dull and uninteresting, so instead I chose to link it to the school itself by resembling the school colours. I chose the lighter shades of blue because they matched the colour of Izzy's top, and I chose the darker shades to contrast with this. I found that a white background was the most effective as other colours made it look either too busy or drew attention away from the other aspects. During the production I found the cover shot and some of the contents page pictures were too dark so I adjusted the lighting on it. I also found that I had a lot of additional space on the cover so I had to make my cover lines bigger. Here is my magazine cover and contents page:

Post-Production: At the end of this task I had produced a cover and contents page for a school magazine. I had learnt a lot of skills on how to use Photoshop as well as what a magazine should look like. I have also found how my mock ups needed to be slightly adapted to make the magazine look better and that how although you can plan the mock-ups very carefully it is important to change things that don’t work well when on the computer. However it is very important that you include a lot of detail on your mock-ups as this both saves time and gives you a better idea of what to do. Overall i think the task went reasonably well. Considering my lack of skills and knowledge about how magazines are designed and produced, as a first attempt i think the end results were ok.