1. AS Media Preliminary Task
Create a College
Magazine Front
Cover and
Contents page.
Preliminary
Task
Evaluation
1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media products?
2) What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing
this product?

2. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
~Front Cover~
Masthead
Date line
Cover lines
Dominant
Image (rule of
thirds)
Footer

3. What are the differences between your front cover and
that of a real media cover?
My magazine is also free, as it
is aimed at students, whereas
‘Red’ has a barcode and price
tag.
My main image is also of a
student where as ‘Red’ have
used a famous celebrity.
I have used a flash on my front
cover to entice students into
wanting the magazine.
My magazine cover has a
plain background to make
the cover lines stand out more,
whereas the real media
product has an interesting
background.

4. In what ways does your media product use, develop or
challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
~Contents Page~
Title
Features of
magazine contents
Main image
for feature
contents
Sub-headings for
contents
Sidebar

5. What are the differences between your contents page
and that of a real media cover?
The actual contents
and features of the
magazines
NME’s main images
are professional and
show famous people,
whereas my images
aren't the best and
show just students.
Colours on NME
contents are kept to a
few which is more
subtle and looks more
professional. The
colours on mine are
more random and
college-like.

6. What have you learnt about the technologies used to
construct this product?
I used Moodle for InDesign was used to put my
resources. whole magazine spread together
and to design my contents page
I used Blogger to upload all of my
finished work for my preliminary
task. Alongside using Blogger I also
used Scribd and SlideShare
I used Adobe Photoshop to
A digital camera was used to gain design my magazine cover
appropriate MCU’s for my cover and edit all images
image and contents page.

7. Using a digital camera, I could make sure my photo was an MCU and would fit my
magazine cover. When I had taken my picture, I used Photoshop to edit it. Firstly, I cropped
my image to enhance the vision of the rule of thirds, so the student was further into eye line.
I then adjusted the levels of the contrast, brightness, background brightness and saturation
to make the student appear healthier and the image to appear brighter.
before after
I used the red-eye tool
to eliminate red eyes
from the original
image, and used the
spot-healing brush tool
to eliminate any
blemishes.
I also used the spot-
healing brush to get
rid of slight under-eye
bags.

8. Using Photoshop, I added the cover lines, masthead, footer and date line to
finish my magazine cover. I used drop shadows on my masthead and main
cover lines to add emphasis, and used the font colour to differentiate between
the masthead and cover lines to make them stand out.
On the flash, I used a
before bevel and emboss, after
colour and gradient
overlay, a pattern
overlay and a stroke
to add the red
border.
I used an outer glow
on the writing
underneath the
main cover line, to
make sure it stood
out against the
background as it is
quite dark.

9. Using InDesign to make my Contents page
I positioned my images around the page and
between sections of the text so it broke up the
page and didn’t look like massive blocks of
writing, which would be boring to look at for
the readers.
Writing was kept to a minimum so readers
wouldn’t get dis-interested.
Using different colours for the different sections
of text made it clearer and separated the
sections, and also made the page brighter and
more interesting. I also placed text in rows so it
was easy and clear to read, with the main text
in the middle of the page, for example the
features, and less important text such as website
addresses in the sidebar.
I used shapes to create a break between the
text that separated the sidebar from the main
contents.