Preliminary Task

 There is a clear colour scheme used on this picture on the front of the magazine, mostly white so that white is clear to read when it is written in a contrasting colour. The strong red and green is clear to read and this stands out, because the writing is outlined by a white outlining, to make the writing stand out to the audience. There isn't a lot of cover lines like a normal fashion magazine or football magazine, just on school matters and there is one cover story. This helps to outline the importance of the matters of the cover lines, that they are mentioned because they are vitally important stories to be read, which helps reel in the audience about important matters involving school. The red border at the bottom of the picture shows a clear separation from the picture and the bottom edge of the page, which indicates the navy blue coloured bottom of the page needs to have clear writing and promotes the importance of the contents of that area of the page.

This Magazine is entitled Next. The background colour is mild blue which fades to a lighter blue near the bottom of the page. Then with contrasting colours using reds, whites, and black for writing and the title, etc. This helps to outline the writing on the page so that the audience can focus on reading it as it stands out to the reader. The use of the bold also outlines the more important cover lines than others, which will help the audience pay attention to the more important issues on the cover. However, there is not a clear colour scheme on this cover, there is a mixture of red, black and white, and the pictures don't particularly aid that either, as every person is wearing a different coloured item of clothing.

This cover has a very good colour scheme, the title is red, the box at the bottom of the page and the red clothes being worn by the girls playing netball. This colour scheme therefore makes the cover more attractive to the audience. the use of contrasting colours for writing as well like white also attracts the audience more, as it is more clear to read as it stands out. The title at the top of the page is white and red, and contrasts very well too. the picture in the middle of the screen shows a good weather picture, shows children in sport and with smiles on their face having fun and this is always a positive thing for a picture, as a school magazine will want to show that the children are happy and enjoying education as well as getting results. A negative from this magazine is that there is only one cover line, about the sports overview, so therefore there isn't anything about the stories within the booklet, so therefore the audience may not choose to look through the booklet as there isn't a good story within the booklet to read about.

Preliminary Designs

     

This is my first hand drawn design, and it is simply creating possible designs for the cover of my preliminary magazine. Here shown is 4 potential lay outs I could have used to design my cover. I ended up choosing my first design which is the design in the top left hand corner, because it had a frame which outlined where all aspects of the cover would go, such as the masthead, the cover lines, the pictures and the sell line so therefore it is well organised and I feel looks a rather good potential cover for a magazine. This document is not very detailed.

This is the next stage in my process of creating my cover. I've picked my layout, now I just need to choose mastheads and also the cover lines for my cover. So I made up some potential mastheads and potential cover lines. The right side of the page combines my chosen designed layout with cover lines too!
This document is more detailed that the page split 4 ways, but still is of a very basic design.

This is the final stage of the actual designing of my cover page. This is where I put all my ideas together onto an A4 piece of paper. It as a very detailed design, and has to be as close to a final design as possible.

This design is of how my pictures on my front cover may be laid out. I have made two designs of two potential images, a large and small image.

This is a mid shot of one of my classmates. This is the original image and I'm going to use Macromedia fireworks to edit this image. In this photo I have made him focus on something off screen so he is staring past the camera and not directly at it. Also, I have placed him where the sun will clearly show his shadow behind him.

Above is the edited picture of my classmate. I have taken out the background and also sharpened the image of him, as you can see compared to the image above, the I have not removed any of his features, apart from a tuft of his hair on the left side of his head, but this was merely because the tuft is not intended so I removed it.

This is the first draft of my front cover. I decided to just use one picture on this to fit in more written information on the cover, which differs from my original design. I decided to do another draft of this to try and improve it, as I wanted to stick to my designs.    

This is my second draft and closer to my original design. I've now got two pictures and also the correct cover lines that I was planning to use before. Therefore I've stuck to my designs, and the page is full with more relevant information than on the previous design, however the colour scheme doesn't satisfy me. I feel it is too boring with the white background, although I don't want to use audacious colours, so I may just change the background to black and make every other thing on the page contrast in terms on colour.

This is my final design and everything stands out a lot more than before, and using colours it can quite clearly be demonstrated which are the more important parts on the page. using a black background and a white title colour, it shows that that is a majorly important part of the cover and for the audience looking at the cover to pay attention to.

Contents Page

This is one of the examples of contents pages I have obtained from Google. This is the unorthodox way to design a contents page. Contents page normally have columns and so its easy to read about which pages certain articles are on, but this has went for a fancy design and it is a very good design nonetheless, especially with the school instruments such as rulers, pens, notepads and rubbers, but it would be a better front cover than contents as its not very clear to see which pages have which articles on.

This is a design of a different school magazine that I found on Google images. The colour scheme and pictures included suggest the target audience is younger students and girls. The soft purple is a stereotypical female colour and hence why this will appeal to girls and younger students especially.

This is another type of design, very different to the other contents pages, but I would consider this a more Orthodox contents page. The use of columns is a more organised approach than the other examples that I've used, and altogether I believe this is a better example.

Designs!

This is my design for my contents page. There are four designs, each trying different layouts to the page, and I have chosen to use the first design which is in the top left hand corner. My reasons for using this is that it clearly shows the masthead and the title of the contents page, and also using columns which is orthodox for a contents page and the general layout of a magazine.

This is the first draft of my contents page which I didn't complete, but I uploaded it to show progress of my production of the contents page. It shows the basic layout of my page, which will have a bar with a black border horizontal across the top of the page, and also a black bar vertical on the left side of the page, which helps shape the page. 

This is the completed version of my contents page, however I haven't created the stories for the pages yet so I just put cover line where it applies necessary. The same layout exists, and the columns also help shape the page which shows for a well organised contents page.