Looking back through the process of making my first magazine cover, the first thing I noticed was the amount of planning that I put into the drafting and editing of the magazine. I took only around 5 shots for my college magazine cover, compared to 18 for my music magazine, not including secondary images. I used many more conventions on my music magazine and did more research into similar products to make it attractive to the target audience. My use of layout and colour is not as good on my college cover and due to this, my music magazine looks a lot more professional and attractive. "HYSTERIA" is laid out as a conventional music magazine, where as "Wyke College Weekly" lacks many conventions and looks as though it has not had much work into it as it looks empty and the text is too large and the feature at the bottom does not use colour to stand out. The text is also not placed well as the feature at the right side needs to be against the right side of the page. The text is also not that easy to read as it blends in with the main image. Researching into the conventions of magazine covers and looking at similar products really helped me in making my final product as I got a better idea of layout and using different elements to use the page space to it's full potential. I also found that making more drafts helped me to develop ideas and change elements in order to achieve the desired effect, making it aesthetically pleasing and appealing to the target audience whilst fitting in with the genre.
Preliminary task college magazine Final product music magazine
Here I show which conventions I used in my college magazine cover and my music magazine cover. As you can see many conventions were missing from my college magazine, but after researching conventions in similar products I have made sure that these conventions were included in my music magazine cover.
During the process of making this product, I learnt many new skills with PhotoShop, including how to edit photos taking away the background from images, removing unwanted parts of an image and editing colour levels to make my images look as good as they can. I learnt more about the conventions of a magazine covers, and how to use these to adapt my cover to a certain genre as well as how to use colour well to make images and text stand out, and have an effective house style which draws in the intended audience. I also learnt the following areas:
Terminology such as - masthead, skyline, plug, base line, featured articles, secondary images, main image, tag lines date line and banner.
Photography skills such as - shot types, shot lengths, depth of field, composition, framing, rule of thirds and lighting.
Photoshop skills such as - eraser tool, brush tool, magnetic lasso, layer formation, blurred lines, soft edges and colour levels.
Composition skills such as - layout, colours, image placement, text font, image/text size, writing style and use of conventional elements.
Research skills such as - LIIAR analysis, mood boards, similar products, conventions and research into target audience and their ideology.
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