Preliminary Task

Analysis of three existing school magazine covers, design process and production process of the cover and a mock-up of the contents page of a new school magazine.

School Magazines Analysis

‘SMS’ is an averagely made magazine cover with a medium shot of a student and a general basic design. The cover displays a relatively good use of flashes and keeps to the same colour scheme across the cover; green and yellow. The questions included in the flashes interest students as they are about controversial school topics; ‘Does homework really help?’, ‘Does School Council work?’. They also advertise the chance to ‘win an iPod’ by simply ‘sharing your views on school life’. This is a good way to entice people as the target audience is teenage students and most teenagers wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to win a free iPod of any kind, especially when all they have to do is state what they believe/think about school life, which most do on a daily basis anyway. However, the title, ‘Study Smart’, is at the bottom of the cover and is not overly bold, resulting in it not being noticed at first glance.

In comparison, ‘The Loyolite’ is more professionally edited and put together as it uses a neutral colour palette consisting of brown, beige, and cream. It has also blurred out the background, leaving the central image in high definition quality and “in your face”. Although there is not much to look at, it looks quite nice and professional, however, it might only interest people who are editors themselves as this magazine cover is more about appreciating the fact that the editors have actually cut the images out quite well.

   

   

In contrast, ‘On Top of the Talk’ is not very professionally edited at all, with the central image of the two students looking as though it has obviously been cut out. As well as this, they have not used upper-case letters for their title or date, which adds to the unprofessionalism of this magazine cover. On a nicer note, they have added page numbers to their topic titles -- this is a handy thing to include as it saves the readers having to search through the magazine to find the page(s) they want.

My School Magazine Cover

(Cover)

My School Magazine - Mock-ups

(Cover)

(Contents)