School Magazine Evaluation

I handed in both my front cover and contents page of my school magazine on Tuesday 7^th February (today). I have now been given this homework to do an evaluation on my school magazine front cover and also my contents page. I will be doing an evaluation on my music magazine when it is done so this is just to practise doing one, the evaluation will be worth 20 marks out of the 100 marks for the coursework. This is my practise evaluation that is done on my school magazine front page and contents page that I have made.  At the bottom of this post are my finished school magazine front cover and contents page.

In what ways does my school magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

·        For my front cover I feel that I have followed the codes and conventions of existing school magazines. As I have put the name of the magazine in a very normal place by having it at the top of the page. I have also put the name of the magazine to the left hand side as well. Something else that I have done at the top of the page is that I have put the issue number and also the price which is to the left on the top of the page, this is what some of the other school magazines that I have looked at. When looking at the fusion magazine that I used for my research I found that this school magazine had the same layout for the title and the issue number. I would not change where I had but my magazine title or the issue number and i may more the price when making my music magazine. As on a music magazine there is a barcode so the price is normally above the bar-code.

·         Something that I have also done on my magazine that is similar to magazines that I have looked at is the place on the front page where the stories are. I have placed the stories around the picture on the front page so that the text can still be seen and read easier but also be able to see the picture that is on the front cover. This is also done in a way on one of the other magazines that I looked at, but this is not really done on the fusion magazine as the text goes onto the picture. I like it when the picture can be seen and also that the text can be read, so I would not really think about putting the text on top of the picture.

·        When looking at my contents page I found that for my title saying Contents is also at the top half of the page to the left. I have done this in a very similar type of on my magazine to the fusion magazine that I used for research. I also when looking at this I found that the size of the text is also very large as well as this helps to make it stand out that it is the contents page.

·        Something else that I found when I looked at my contents page and compared it to the fusion school magazine, is that I have a  picture on my contents page but on the fusion magazine there is not a photo that has been taken but there are cartoon pictures.

·        One last thing that I through about when looking at my contents page and comparing it to the fusion magazine is that  the page names and numbers are laid out in an different way but they both have the number of the page and the name of the page. But on the fusion magazine there is a bit of information about what is on that page. This is something that I feel would have been good if I had done on my as it gives the reader more information on what the pages are on as the name may not explain what is on the page enough.

What have I learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

·        When I was talking the photos for the cover and also for the contents page, I had to make sure that the camera was in focus and also that I did not have any think in the background or in the frame that I did not want to be in the photo.  To try and get the type of picture that I wanted for my school magazine. I also had to make sure that I got a medium close-up for my front cover, so I had to think about making sure that I got an good medium close-up.

·        When I took my photo I used natural light, as there was enough light in the place where I was taking the pictures. So then there was no really need for extra lighting to be used for my photos.

·        When I was editing my photos that I took in Photoshop I started to learn how to use some of the other tool that I did not know how to use and I also used some that I did already know how to use. Some of the tools that I used were things like the background fill, the magnetic lasso, rubber, select and other tool like these. These all helped me to edit my images so that they had the background that I wanted like the photo that went on my contents page where I changed the background colour so that it would be the same as the colour of the contents page, as the background was white and I thought that it stood out to much on the blue background.