Preliminary Task

For my Preliminary Task, I have been set the task of making a college magazine. I am going to take a medium-close up shot of a student, this will be my main image on my front cover. I will also have to put a story line and a header with that to make my front cover look acceptable. On top of this front cover I will put together a contents page and a double page spread. This is all good practice as I will become more confident using all software to create a magazine and so will have no doubts when it comes to make my final magazine.

This is an image of the mock up front cover produced in my preliminary task. Firstly I took a photo of a girl in my class to put on my front cover as the main story. I then went through the process of cutting the background out of the image to leave me with just the body shot of the student. I had to think what background would work well with this image and decided to go with a plain blue. I thought the image would show up better on a blue background than on a black background for example. With these darker colour's in the background and picture I felt I needed a brighter colour for the text, I chose the colour yellow because I felt it showed up better on the background. The Main title of the magazine is in the biggest font so it is recognisable and sells the name of the magazine. I put the main headline about Jess in a bigger font and a different style of text to the rest this all adds up to attract the attention of the reader. all the other less important bits of information are written in a smaller font size and the same style of lettering. 


I feel there are thing I could improve on this layout of the front cover, these consist of being more careful when cutting out the image. Looking back at the cut out image it looks rushed and so I will be careful not to make this same mistake when doing my real magazine front cover. There other problems with this front cover these consist of all the blank space that I didn't use up, the basic blue background which I think is a bit plain and lastly I have made a silly mistake in not checking my spelling as I spelt the word 'mountain' wrong.

This is a mock up of a contents page I drew up. Its a basic idea that came to mind when thinking what kind of layout to do. Its basic and plain but it shows all information that is needed on a contents page. Again looking at the picture of my contents page I feel it looks a bit rushed and untidy, this is a element of my work that i need to cut out and start being more careful when doing my work. I think when I come to do my actual contents page I will have the background as an image because looking at it like this it looks really plain. When I come to planning my contents page I think the best way go forward with it would be to look at a contents page in a magazine that I like and not copy it but take the layout and use it for inspiration when planning what i want the page to look like.