Front Cover Construction

03/11/08 - Today we began creating our front covers, at the beginning of the lesson we were given a list of 30 lessons we have from now until christmas, on specific dates we were told to right down notes, for example, on the 6th lesson we have to hand in a draft of our cover and hand in the final copy on lesson 8. However, I didn't start my magazine today as before the holidays Miss Furness was ill on the day I was supposed to be giving my presentation therefore I did mine today instead.


04/11/08 - Today I began my magazine, I began on microsoft publisher using a 'program' template in order to get the two single pages and the double page I needed for my magazine. The first thing I did was create the magazines background which, according to my questionnaire results, was to be green and blue. I used a shape drawer to draw a large square around the page and used the programs tools to fill it in with two colours in a fade effect. The colours came front the centre, they started in green and spread into blue around the edges. I then added on the magazines title which was to be 'Music Central' in the font Badoni MT Black using wordart on Microsoft Publisher.





05/11/08 - Today I decided that I wanted my magazine to have a logo so it was easy to differentiate it from others if, perhaps, some of its features were slightly similar. At first I chose a shape that I was going to surround the mian logo with and settled on a diamond, at first I settled on a musical note as the main shape as it is soemthing that is most commonly associated with music but once I had put it together it seemed to plain.
I then came across a guitar image with a bubble underneath it and fortunately it was in the same colours as my colour scheme, blue and green, so I decided to use this image as my logo although after a little though i decided not to go with the diamound shape surrounding it as it didn't go too well with it.

I also changed the background of my magazine today, I found that my current background didn't stand out as much as i wanted it to and therefore decided to change it. I thought back to when we created the school magazine and remebered the school's new logo which got me thinking. I eventually created a background for my magazine that was similar to the logo but with less colours, I kept the green and blue colour scheme but after looking back at my questionnaire results I noticed that pink and blue tied at four votes each , so I adjusted it slightly so that the background included three colours instead of just two.

Finally, today was bonfires night and every year me and my family go around to either my step-dads sisters or my grandas and set off fireworks, this year we went to my grandas and it was there that I managed to take the pictures I needed for my magazine (these images can be seen on 'The Photos' page).

06/11/08 - I changed the font of my magazines title today as found that the font caused the letters to be very close together and made it harder to read, I changed it to 'Berlin Sans FB Demi'. I also added an image to the front cover, it is of my brother. Unfortunately the way the image was taken you were able to see the contents of his jacket pocket therefore I had to edit the image just above the waste in order to hide the contents and make the image as professional as possible. I added the artists name 'Chriz' to the size of the image, that too was in 'Berlin Sans FB Demi' font, I added this using wordart on microsoft publisher and the positioned it so that it was on a slant. Today was the day I also thought of the coverlines that were to go my magazine cover, I used the same font but didn't use wordart, I used the shape drawing tool on microsoft publisher instead and used them to write in, these boxes were coloured the three colours of my colour scheme, green, blue and pink and the writing was coloured white to make sure that they were still readible.

10/11/08 - Today I was told that I was unable to have an image where the body was floating in the middle of the cover which is what is happening in the image in the above magazine cover. As cutting this image any lower would mean showing the contents of the pocket I decided to change the picture and use one where it was possible to cut lower.

I was also told today that it would be better to do my magazine in macromedia fireworks instead of powerpoint to give it that sense of professionalism. I therefore began to move things onto fireworks and plan to finish this next lesson.

11/11/08 - Today is the deadline for our cover draft, I was still adding things onto fireworks and once I finished this I had to e-mail my teacher my magazine cover so she can review it and give us feedback and improvements to be made the following lesson.
When adding things the layout slightly changed from what it looks like above as the image was moved from the middle to the far right and the boxes surrounding the coverlines were taken away. The title and logo were also moved slightly as instead of being spread along the top the title was moved to the the left hand side with the words beneath each other and the logo went in the small gap to the right of 'Music' and was minimised slightly in order for it to fit. I also changed the position of the artists name 'Chriz' as instead of being diagonal next the image the letters were positioned below each other and the whole name was moved so that it was reading from top to bottom over the top of the image but I made sure that doing this didn't constrict the view of the image.

During the day I recieved feedback on my magazine front cover and was told that a variety of things on it don't work and were given suggestions in order to fix it. However, instead of making these slight improvements I understood myself that nothing about the cover seemed conventional with a true magazine which is why I decided to create a whole new cover conventional to its requirements. I replaced the picture with a picture of a friend as well as changing the background and removing the logo. After completing it I then e-mailed my final, improved, cover to my teacher.

12/11/08 - Today I was off school ill so i was unable to do any further work today.