Preliminary Task - School Magazine

The Preliminary Task is to design and create a front cover for a magazine that could be given out at my school (Monkseaton High School). Before starting to even design my magazine I did some research into existing school magazines, while researching I came across the magazine for George Stephenson High School, Evolve (left).

Researching different existing covers has allowed me to create a magazine that people would like to see. In my opinion the colours from this magazine are quite dull and helped me realise that eye-catching colours would make the cover stand out more and therefore more likely to be read by students. The magazine cover I’m going to create will be more colourful than the one above as I believe that brighter colours will make it more appealing, I am going to colour the background of the cover in light blue and made the writing green when it comes to including the cover lines.

As the magazine I’m creating is a school magazine it is obvious that the target audience would be students attending this school. In order to understand more about my target audience I am going to develop a questionnaire to get students opinions on what I should include in the magazine as even though it is only the cover page I will create I will be adding cover lines so this questionnaire will allow me to use cover lines that will interest the students.

Handing out my questionnaire gave me more help than I thought it would, the results helped me decide on a magazine cover, M.H.S, it was the most popular one on my questionnaire and therefore it was the one I chose. I also asked a question on student’s favourite colours, this may seem a silly question when I am planning to make a magazine cover but a colour scheme is always important to catch people’s attention so I asked this question to know what colours people favour more and these were the colours that I chose, as it happens it was green and blue that were most popular and as these two colours go together nicely this was the colour scheme I used chosen by the students.

The layout of a magazine cover is also important as it is important to try and create something that is unique so I designed five different layouts and included a question which asked the students to pick which one they liked the best by ticking the appropriate box, it turned out that design 3 was the most popular (right).

I used this design to create my magazine although I did change some of the things as I didn’t include a group photo or the pattern in the bottom right hand corner, I changed things slightly as as I was adding things to the cover I was losing space so I had to refrain from adding certain aspects so that the main features i.e. the title and student image were still able to be added. So from the questionnaire I was able a magazine chosen by the students and made for the students. Every choice they put down on that questionnaire was taken into consideration and, if it was possible, turned into a reality on the front cover.

The picture I have decided to use for my magazine is a picture of Eleanor (Ellie) Smith, she is a year 12 student and has been at Monkseaton High School for three years so I believe she is the perfect choice as she knows the school better than some of the younger years. Deciding which picture I was going to use didn’t take much organisation because I knew the magazine was targeted at students and therefore I found it only fitting that I include a student on the cover. However, for the main task the photos I am going to use will take a lot more organisation as this preliminary task is only creating the front cover whereas the main task includes the front cover, contents page and a double page spread meaning that I will need to use more than one image.

Overall I believe that the preliminary task has been a success and has allowed me to experience what it will be like creating a magazine before creating the music magazine required for the main task, thanks to this I believe that creating the music magazine will be slightly easier as I have now done part of it once before.