Evaluation of school magazine task

Evaluation of school magazine cover and contents page

For this piece of work I had to construct a school magazine aimed at one of three audiences; the whole school, a specific year group or the sixth form. I chose to aim my magazine at the sixth form as I thought it would be interesting to have a less academically based magazine.

Overall, I am happy with the way my magazine has turned out. A couple of things, however, did go wrong and I did not have time to put them right. This includes the quality of the photos on the contents page as they seem quite blurred and the colours also seem quite dull. I am still pleased with the layout of the contents page and I feel that it works well. If I did have more time I would have taken the time to style and position people for photographs, rather than just walking around the common room during a lesson. This is something that I will take on to the music magazine and hopefully to make it better.

I have also found that usually contents pages are white with black text. I have used a blue background with white text which goes against the usual style of a magazine. I feel that the white box at the top helps to balance the amount of white space; however, for my music magazine I will have to consider what magazines are usually like a lot more. If I had more time for research, which I will have when I make my music magazine, I would have looked into school magazines and the normal layout a lot more than what I did.

I feel that the image on the front cover is very effective as it symbolizes and relates to the main featured article. The fonts are all the same, with variety on the size and colour. This works well as it enables the viewer distinguish between the text but also allow it to all look as if it belongs there. The four topics stated at the bottom are all related to the results of the questionnaire as these were among the favourite things to read about. Also because they are all quite different it means that the magazine can appeal to a wide variety of people, and therefore, the whole sixth form.

Another problem I had was resizing the photos to the correct size. This means that they become distorted due to the constant stretching and shrinking of the images. I am now used to what size an image needs to be for a specific task. This means that this shouldn’t be a problem when I make my music magazine.

I feel that all of the problems that I have had have helped me in going forward to make my music magazine and although there are some problems, I feel that with the time I was given and the fact that this is my first task, I feel that it went very well.