Evaluation of school magazine

My task was to design and create a school magazine following the codes and conventions of any magazine. To achieve this I observed relevant magazines to suit my genre e.g. Weather Report. After getting idea's and a rough outline of what a school magazine generally consists of i started to construct my magazine.

Firstly, I chose a name for my magazine which was relevant to the genre. I had many different ideas for magazine names e.g. "Fact", "achieve" and "WHS" but I chose "WHS" as it is a shortened version of Weatherhead. I have used colloquialism in my title as it aims more towards my target audience school pupils and students. My masthead would be placed in either the top left hand corner of the page or running across the top, this is a general codes and convention of any magazine. After settling on a title, i then had to think of several feature articles and several regular content articles. The articles that i chose were relevant for my genre but also relevant to my target audience. The codes and conventions of articles is that they are all the same font and generally the colour is cohesive to the masthead. After choosing my masthead and articles i then drawn a brief sketch of what my front cover and contents page will look like.

From then i took a camera around the school grounds and took pictures for my front cover and my contents page. I took different frames and angles of images to assure i capture them as best as i could for my magazine. Magazines generally consist of having a central image, i chose to have a medium close up of a student holding their exam results in front of them. To make my image the background i used Adobe Photoshop to achieve this. This programme is good to use when creating a magazine to make it more professional as you can, crop, edit the image, edit texts, edit the colours and change the image. I found Photoshop a really good programme to create my front cover as it was easy to use and follow. However, the cons of using Photoshop is that you can't use it to produce a contents page as there are no guidelines for your featured articles.

After creating my front cover i then used QuarkXPress to create my contents page. This was the first time i had used Quark and found it enjoyable but at the same time hard work as i was picking up on news skills and techniques. I found this programme easier to use for my contents page as guidelines where provided. These guide lines would prevent any images or texts being cut off. The cons of QuarkXPress is that it is more complicated to use then Photoshop and you cannot get the precise size of an image to fit on your page as you can't resize the image to a desired size. 

Overall i think i had worked hard on achieving the out come of my magazine, however i would change the following: i would of spent more time on my initial draft as it was a baseline of what the final product should look like yet my magazine didn't aspire to be the exact same as the images i had captured were unreliable as i put down as an article "Italian exchange" this proved difficult to capture a image due to the location. For my main task i will take on board what i found as my weaknesses and try and improve on them to achieve a better product outcome.