1. Evaluation
Overall I think that this task went well for me as I understood it well and think I
took in all my knowledge that I learnt, and already knew, to create a well thought
out college magazine front cover and contents page.
When it came to the research tasks I found it fairly easy to analyse the front
covers and contents pages, which really helped me when creating my own. I
looked at all the features of the front covers and contents pages and made sure
that I included some in my own. This task helped making the drafts of my layouts
fairly easy as I had knowledge of real college magazines to take into account
when creating them. With the help of the analysis task asking a questionnaire
really helped to link my magazine so it would be presentable to real people that I
know, instead of just thinking of my own thoughts. The questionnaire answers
helped me with many aspects of my magazine as they gave me a real insight of
what people wanted. The first thing that I got stuck on was the masthead. This
was a harder task for me as I really struggled to find a suitable masthead. Due to
this, I decided to make a question in my questionnaire asking about any ideas
people may have, I made this question an open one as I thought that if anyone
had an idea then they could just write it straight down. The most chosen one was
“College Life” which is why I decided that to be my masthead. Also, by asking
questions such as “What are you interested in that you would like to read articles
about?”, really helped me to think of possible articles that would appeal to a
variety of people to put in my contents page.
I found that when producing my draft layouts that looking at other magazines
really helped to design my own. I feel as though doing this task really helped to
choose the best-suited layout instead of diving straight in and using the first one
I thought of.
From this preliminary task I learnt that a lot of thought goes into creating each
page of a magazine and I think that it has really helped me to know how to
prepare and complete the main task.
I think that if I were to re-do this task that I would design a few more layouts to
choose from. Also, I would look closer at colours and experiment with them to
find out what makes it look most professional without being cheesy and too
young for the intended audience.