Contents Page

Just finished creating my content page... please comment your thoughts underneath the picture in order to help me with the design, thanks.

Designing the content page

As i've finished with my front page, I am starting to work with the content page of my magazine.. Here are two possible different designs I might use for it.

Front Page

As the task is to create a school magazine, the front page is obviously the most important page, therefore I spent a lot of time designing it. Here is my dedesign :

I have just finished implementation of my front page, please comment underneath what you think about it :)

the final choice of MASTHEAD

I have created a survey and here are the results

The final choise was this font :

MASTHEAD

Today I have been working on masthead fonts and I will list my final choses underneath. In order to pick one I will print out these fonts and ask one student from each year to pick best 3, then I will be able to pick one which was liked the most.

Photoshoot

I have just taken some photos which could possibly be used for my magazine front cover.Please comment if you really like one of the pictures. Thanks to Doncho "chop" Penev who was very kind and was modeling for the magazine.

I am finally back !

After a long rest I had because of my knee injury I am back and today I have been pratcising my photoshop skills. Of course I picked a football magazine as my example and I have worked hard on working with it. The main aim of today's lesson for me was to learn how to crop perfectly and how to match colours and pictures together.I think this lesson went well and I achieved my targets.

Questionnaire answers

Before I actually start designing I would like to post answers to my survey about the magazine.


Question 1
What would you like to see in the school magazine?

A) School gossips (e.g. relationships)
B) School events (e.g. sport,music)
C) Something about college (interesting facts)
D) Outside the school events
E) Fashion
F) IT ( information technology)
G) Funny section
H) History
I) Something to help you with exams
J) Other : "Complete list of all responses given to this question"

Question 2
Would you ever pay for the school magazine? if you picked "YES", please go to question 3, if you picked "NO" go to question 4

A) YES
B) NO

Question 3
How much would you pay for the school magazine?

A) 25p
B) 50p
C) £1
D) £2
E) £5
F) Other

Question 4
Which year group are you in?

A) Year 7
B) Year 8
C) Year 9
D) Year 10
E) Year 11
F) Year 12
G) Year 13
H) I am a teacher
I) I am a parent/relative
J) I am someone outside the school

Question 5
How often would you like to see the magazine released?

A) once a week
B) twice a month
C) once a month
D) once a halfterm
E) once a term
F) once a year

Question 6
What would you like to see on the front cover?

A) Students studying
B) Students doing sports activities
C) Students doing art activities
D) Students doing music activities
E) Students relaxing
F) Teachers
G) School facilities

Question 7
What colour scheme do you prefer to be used in the school magazine?

A) White and Black
B) White, Turquoise and Black
C) White, Purple and Black
D) White, Purple and Black
E) White, Purple and Black
F) White, Purple and Black
G) Red, Green, Yellow and Blue
H) Other "Black and Yellow"
"Black and Yellow"
"All colours"
"Orange, White and Purple"

Question 8
What would you prefer to see in the magazine more?

A) Images
B) Text
C) Both

Question 9
What type/types of images would you like to see?

A) Close-ups
B) Mid-shots
C) Long-shots
D) Extreme close-ups

Question 10
Did you find this survey easy and comfortable to use?

A) YES
B) NO

Starting to design

I am finally finished with the name so now I can begin to design my page. The first and in my opinion the main part of designing is Masthead. I will post some ideas of Edmundans' Masthead please comment whichever you like.

The name of the magazine has been chosen

The final decision for the name was made and it is Edmundians

Finishing analysis!

I finished analysing some of school magazines and now I would like to summarize what I have done so far. I prefered reading "Student ID" to "Common Sense" and it was mostly because of the colours picked of the magazines. "Common Sense" looked more boring to me and more depressing. I made a list whith what I should include into my magazine and what I shouldn't :

Should be included

Colourful cover

A nice Masthead

A letter from editors

Pictures on the front cover

Should not be included

Boring colours

Random texts on the front page

Double repeat of content page

Analysing some other magazines:Content analysis of Student ID

Even thought the content pages of the magazines I analysed looked very similar, the actuall content is very different. "Student ID" is a magazine which is more about college life and includes topics, such as :
- year enrichments
- college updates
- university questions
- school music
- charity shop

And as we know it is a school magazine, so the target audience is TEENAGERS, therefore this magazine also includes topics which will be interesting for them :
- festivals
- fashion
- films

Analysing some other magazines:Textual analysis of Student ID

The content page of the magazine looks very similar to "Common Sense" and basically reminds me of it. What we can see on this page is a big header saying "Inside ID" , which basically gets us to understand that it is the content page.Also as I said before I really like the idea with a picture of the editors and a letter from them. Which helps us to know who the editors are and to understand their ideas more. Also by having letter, the editors could tell us what's going to be included into the next magazine.
However, even thought the content is made in a very good order, the pictures by the normal content doesn't look like a good idea to me, because the content is reapeted twice, but it still looks better than "Common Sense".
Because of the colourful cover I expected to see the content page made in the same way but expectations were ruined by seeing boring colours again.

Analysing some other magazines:Textual analysis of Student ID

By having a look at this magazine you can see a very bright and colourful cover, which gives this magazine a stand out from any other magazine. Also there is a very nice masthead in order to keep the brand. On the top of the masthead it says "Ludlow college student magazine", which,basically, shows what is the target audience for this magazine is like. A lot of pictures on the front cover also help us to understand what this magazine is like and what does it contain.
However, even though the colours really make the magazine outstanding they also make it difficult to read what is written by the pictures. I managed to read the text and it makes absolutelly no sense to me and it doesn't help me to get the content of this magazine.Also it feels like there is a little mistake with picking colours of the texts by the pictures, because it was very difficult to read some of it.
There is an advantage and a disadvantage of having bright colours on your frontpage but in my opinion it is a very good idea, therefore I will try and use it in my magazine.

Finally!

Just finished doing first analysis, a little bit behind but I will catch up

Analysing some other magazines:Content analysis of Common Sense

As I wrote before, the magazine is aimed at students of that college, therefore the magazine is mostly about :
- celeb stories
- student news
- student sex appeal
- film news
- some true life stories
Basically, it is about something,which will attract a teenager. I could use some of the ideas from Common Sense in order to make my magazine more interesting.

Analysing some other magazines: Textual analysis of Common Sense

By opening the content page of this magazine the first thing we can see is the word "CONTENT" which is written with a fontsize,which is like twice bigger than the other fontsizes. The colour was picked for this main heading is very boring because it is black and the background is white.At the top of the page there is a masterhead which identifies the magazine.The masterhead is printed in the same colours as on the front pages and it is really standing out compare to other writings on this page. Straight under the main heading there is a list of articles which are in the magazine and it is written again in black. However, the content is very good in terms of the actual writing, on the right of the content there is another content which basically says the same thing but in pictures, even the heading says "what's in.." and it is straight under the main heading. The only idea I really liked on this page was the letter from editors, which helps readers to know what was included in previous page and what is this magazine actually about.To help us to understand more about this letter,the editors highlighted the key points of this letter with blue. There are also pictures of editors included, so people can actually see who they are. At the bottom of the letter there is a picture of the front page to show us what issue we are looking at and to identify the brand as well. Overall this page really disappointed me, because the front cover had a lot of good ideas.

Analysing some other magazines:Textual analysis of Common Sense

The name of the magazine I am analysing first is Common sense and it was printed in Luton for a sixth form college. As it says on the front page, this magazine is free, therefore this is not a business, it is clearly just for students of this college and this magazine is not printed to compete on the market.
By looking at the front cover we can see a big and colourful masthead with the name of the magazine, which is very easy to see because the background is dark. Another text that can be easily seen is a banner at the bottom of the front page, which says "American Idiots". This saying makes readers think what does this actually mean,so basically it makes the reader intrested. However,straight under the banner there is an answer to our question. Another good idea I can see on this page is putting cover lines on it.By putting cover lines readers could possible tell what is this magazine about without even openning it. The colour was picked for the cover lines is yellow,which is another colour which can easily be seen on a dark background. Common sense has some more great ideas, which could be included to my magazine, such as a strapline, which introduces readers to main articles and as we can see the colour for this bit is yellow, so readers can see it without any problems. However,something I really don't like about this magazine is a very boring, dark background and the picture. This isn't a magazine I would like to read, when I am in a happy mood,because it will just be gone.

Please fill in my survey to help me with designing the school magazine

Click this message to go to the form

Action Plan

In order to keep up with time, I have decided to create an Action Plan:

Week of 7.11.11
- Set up a blog
- Write an action plan
- Create a poll
- Create a questionnairre
- Analyse at least 2 students magazines

Week of 14.11.11
- Create a design for my magazine
- Take photos

Week of 21.11.11
- Finish implementation of the magazine

Week of 28.11.11
-Test pages
-Evaluate final pages

My first task

Hey world! Today we are starting a new preliminary task which will be a new school/college magazine.I'm expected to be using DTP and an image manipulation program such as Photoshop. The magazine has to have a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some laid-out text and a masthhead. Additionally I will have to produce a mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of DTP.