Preliminary Task - School Magazine

My Preliminary Task was to create a school magazine for Whitley Bay High School, I had to create a front cover and a contents page. There was only one rule, all photography had to be taken ourselves. I started off by selecting my house style, I used the same colours as Whitley Bay High School do, blue, red and white. I also selected a similar font of the one that is used on the logo of the school. Both of these instantaneously gave it the feel of the schools magazine. I then worked on the header, I selected all of the key information about the magazine a laid it out to give it a stylish look, I made sure it all fit in the top third to give room for my photography and text. I included images that I had taken around the school and then used a mid-shot for the main story of the magazine which took up a lot of the page. Additionally I added references to important/interesting stories inside. On the contents page I kept to the same house style as the front page, this kept the magazine consistent. I also included the logo of Whitley Bay High School on the top right of the page. Next I listed all the contents to its page number from 1-5, giving extra information about each page to draw the reader to it. At the bottom I included two images that I had taken around the school to give a feel for the school and to make it more appealing than text dominated.

I was given feedback which told me ways in which I could improve. To improve the front cover I was told that the images shouldn't be covering the mid-shot I had used for the main photo. This is because it needs to stand out from everything else and appeal as the main focus of interest. For the contents page I was told the numbering started too early and that it would never happen in an established magazine. Advertisement and credits take up the first lot of pages so an established magazine would really start at around page 6. I will use this feedback and the skills I have developed to help evolve my ideas for creating a professional magazine of high quality. I would say the contents page was the main weakness of my preliminary task so, doing research into various contents pages will really help to strengthen my ability.