Janakan - AS Media Coursework (G321): Preliminary Task

In my preliminary task, I'm going to evaluate my front cover and my content page, which were designed in Adobe Photoshop CS6 for the Haydon School. For my front cover, I chose two colours for the title because both of the colours represents the Haydon School and the colours are purple and white. The font I have used for the title is called 'Bernard MT Condensed' which is a bold and simple font which attracts the students' attention from a far distance. However, the texts around the title has a complete different font as I wanted the magazine to look lively and interesting instead of being dull and plain. Furthermore, I added clip arts of everything that is related to Haydon School, for example: dictionary, thesaurus, books, bags and the students' accessories. The main image of the front cover is a student at Haydon School who achieved excellent GCSE grades and the reason why I chose to put a picture of a student is because I wanted the students to be inspired and look up by the student who's on the magazine. Furthermore, the texts around the title are spread all over the front page so that the students have an idea of what the magazine is about and also can focus on the front page too. In the background, I added a picture of the cloud to give the magazine a nature feeling and a picture of the school building behind the title to make the font stand out. At the bottom of the front cover, I added the school website so that the students know where to go to find out more about a topic that's in the magazine.

In my content page, I added an image of the same cloud that's been used in the front cover to show the students that both of them are in the same magazine. At the top of the page, I added the title too so that the students know what the page is really about. Each of the pages' name has a number on the left to guide the students where each pages are. The title is in two colours (Blue and Black) and the reason why I chose those two colours is because they both stood out when I was looking at the title from a far distance. The names and the numbers of the pages are in multi-colours which in other words, it is coded so that the students get a clear understanding of where each pages are and also, I used different colours to attract the students because normally, students are more into colourful pages than plain pages.

The positive thing about my magazine is that I have put in so much effort in it as it was a task given by my Media teacher. The strength about my magazine is that I made the front cover colourful and lively with so much clip arts around the title and texts all over the page. I personally think that I have met the criteria for the preliminary task and have successfully succeeded the task by designing a school magazine for Haydon School. However, I could have improved my front cover by having a school slogan somewhere in the page so that it could influence the students, add more texts at the bottom of the title and make the title bold. I also could have improved the content page by adding social networking sites like: Facebook and Twitter and add special messages of the seniors to influence the students in school.

I will make sure that when I come across a task like this in future, I use the new skills that I have been taught by the experts for my actual task and also make sure that my magazine looks simple but professional when it comes to presenting to the students.