Initial School Magazine Cover Ideas

Preliminary Magazine Task: This is my initial idea for my school magazine cover. As you can see I have included the main features that make a magazine cover, such as: a masthead, photos and headlines. These basic yet important elements are key for the cover of a magazine to succeed in catching the eye of the target audience.

For my title, I want a clear bold font, but something that also gives a fun colourful approach. I have chosen to use three photos, one just underneath the masthead,  this will be the main image and headline, so I need to think carefully about an appropriate yet interesting story for the readers. The two other photos are placed just below, the one photo will also need to be thought about carefully as it features in the left third, which is generally the first part of the magazine, readers will see if the magazines were lay out.

I have chosen to put a tagline at the bottom, it will be a slogan for the magazine  and I intend for it to be memorable to the magazine buyers. I have placed the school logo in the bottom right hand corner, so that it will be out of the way of any headlines and cover stories, but will still be seen and so readers can identify it clearly.

One thing that I want to look into for this design, is the background as I do not think that blank spaces look appealing nor professional, so I need to think about the design idea here and perhaps have the main story as a background photo.

Questionnaire Evaulation

To help analyse my questionnaire results,  I put some of the questions&answers that I recieved,  into pie charts.

                               1. What style of music do you listen to most?

My results show that pop is the most common type of music listened,  in a wide age range. My ages ranged from 14 - 50, and 7 out of the 15 people I asked chose pop music.

What genre of music magazine would you be most interested in buying?

There was a little more variation in this answer, while Chart music was the most popular, Rock and Pop were also favourable, and there were two people who ticked other and one wrote Dance and the other - Alternative.

Do you currently purchase a music magazine on a regular basis?

One person out of 15, said that they did buy a music magazine on a regular basis and said they bought it monthly.

What type of magazine do you prefer to buy?

This was the only question that the results varied a fair bit. Gossip magazines proved most popular with 5/15,  with Fashion getting 3/15 votes. The one person who chose other,  said they didnt buy any magazines.

How often do you purchase magazines (not specific to music)?

The majority of people that I asked said they either bought a magazine less than once a month, or once a month.

Also in this questionnaire I asked whether people had purchased music magazines, and if yes, which one. 7 people out of 15, said that they had purchased music magazines, 3 said they had bought Kerrang,  3 said NME  and 1 person said Q! magazine.

Key Designer Principle - Production Tips

 A list of Production tips:

• Separate the most important aspect on the page from the rest.
• Spend time cropping and resizing images using clipping paths so you can work on an image and not the background.
• Experiment with filtering and other effects to create impressions of motion (moving) or soft focus- only use an effect that is essential.
• Use a range of fonts and sizes but remember to consider contrast between font ad purpose - one font can relate to the heading or titles.
• Use a pyramid approach for margins, the margins at the bottom should be broader than those higher up.
• Used DDP publishing and guidelines to keep text and images neatly arranged.
• Experiment with colour = black and white or white and black to show contrast.