Evaluation of School Magazine - Preliminary Task

I tried to ensure that my school front cover and contents page followed as many of the codes and conventions as it could. Some codes and conventions I adapted in my own ways, and some admittedly I did not conform to. Throughout this evaluation I plan to comment on many of the codes and conventions and I will compare my own work to that of other magazines. I will also write about the new skills that I have learnt throughout the task and new software that I have used. Also how these technologies allowed me to construct my work in teh way I did. Finally I will comment on  the strengths and weaknesses of my product and also my strenghts and weaknesses of new media technologies.
As previously stated I tried to ensure that my school front cover and contents page followed as many of the codes and conventions as it could. Some codes and conventions I adapted in my own ways, and some admittedly I did not conform to. I will now list the codes and convention of magazine front covers and contents pages and explain how I dealt with them individually.

Front Cover:

• A bold, eyecatching masthead- I believe that my masthead is bold, it is very eyecatching due to the use of two different colours and it contrasts with the banner behind it.
• A main image- I minipulated this in my own way because my main image became my background.
• A tagline- I think my tagline is very catchy and explains the magazine in a sentance
• A barcode- My barcode is clearly visable at the bottom of my magazine
• An issue number and date- I had an issue number on my magazine but I did not conform with the concept of an issue date
• I do have bold font on the front cover of my magazine
• Buzz Words-I do not have any buzz words on the front of my magazine and this is something that i must work on for my final product
• Promotions-I do not have a promotion in my magazine but I did not feel it was necessary
• Coverlines-My magazine did contain coverline
• Colour scheme for front cover- I did follow a colour scheme-apart from the mise-en-scene of my main image I kept to three colours- dark blue, light blue and red.

Contents Page

• Main Image which relates to story-I have a full body shot of the girl on the front of my magazine
• Page numbers on images-I have page numbers on all of my images
• Small text (no more than 11 pt) -I have 11pt text for the weekly stories but I used larger font to write the cover stories
• Columns-My contents page is in columns, mainly because that is the layout of quark
• Page numbers next to stories-I have each story labelled with a page number
• Main image reflects double page spread-In this case I do not have a double page spread, however if i did this would be my double page spread
• Most important stories first-In my contents page I have the cover stories first and the other stories below and they do not stand out as much

To construct my media product I used Adobe Photoshop to create my front cover and QuarkXpress. I have used the program before and I enjoy using the programme and I have a good understanding of the tools and effects. This allowed me to cut out my main image neatly and precisely. I also had better practice of using the text tool and I improved my knowledge of layering. For the contents page I was not familiar with the programme QuarkXPress. At first I was reluctant to use the programme but I soon got used to the tools. Some aspects of the programme I found frustrating, for example the layers and the fact that you have to set the layout of your page. I soon realised that the programme was a lot more accurate to create a contents page with and it looks a lot more professional than creating a contents page on Adobe Photoshop. I hope that this preliminary exercise has given me some more experience before I create my final piece, especially when it comes to creating a contents page.
The strengths of my final production are: I follow many of the codes and conventions, I think that my magazine looks good considering we had little time to create it, I used edited photos in my magazine and the editing of my pictures were to quite a high standard. The weakness' of my magazine were: I only had one image on my front cover, there was too much background showing on my contents page, the magazine was not up to professional standards because of the time we had to create it.
The strengths of my use of photoshop were the cutting out of the photos and my organized use of layers. My weakness' of photoshop are where I position things against the mise-en-scene of images. My strengths of QuarkXPress are that I got to grips with the programme fairly quickly. My weaknesses' are the positioning of the items of the page and my choice of colours on the programme.
If I was to redo the task I would have chose different colour schemes, better cover stories and a more interesting feature article.