The project brief required creating the front page and the contents page of a school magazine including a picture of a student and appropriate text, as I have previously stated on my first post. Having read the brief I then researched school magazines to find general good features that I could maybe include in my magazine and other areas, which I could improve and include on mine as well. I think I managed to start having an idea of what to include, what wouldn't look good and what type of text was required upon completing that research. I then drew a rough version of what I wanted my magazine to look like and further developed that sketch on Pages, making it more organized and detailed as I labeled each section with what would be placed there. I then did the same for the plan of my contents page, even though I have to admit that I was quite hard to think about what else I would include other than an index. The result can be seen on my second post.
With the plan done, I moved into choosing the colour scheme and the fonts I would use. I settled for blue and green to be the colours I would use more, since green is the main colour on our school logo and blue goes well with it. I chose a basic Helvetica font for the main text and used Zapfino for titles and headlines. I then did the masthead and went on to fill the date and issue and the page numbers and then gradually filling in all the written information. In my opinion, the hardest part of the task was when deciding what to write on the index in the contents page. I took me quite a while before I completed that section. I then added a background. I researched for images related to school and settled for one that had colours used on my colour scheme and images that wouldn't look too childish or too mature so that it would appeal to the whole high school age group.
My magazine now had all the writing and a few images like the contents page's background and the school logo but it still lacked pictures of students, which were required by the brief. So I took some pictures around school, during lessons and asking students to pose with perfect uniform. I added some of the pictures I took to my magazine. Soon a problem appeared. There was a big white space in the picture and that needed to be filled. I spent about some minutes thinking and overcame this problem. I moved my picture up, so that there wasn't a white space left on the top anymore, but a black space at the bottom. This was filled by a simple, yet adequate banner.
Working with Pages was quite simple since I was already familiar with it. Therefore, it made the whole process of making the magazine easier and faster. I think the contents page was done to the best of my ability and looks very good and real. I think the time dedicated on doing that has paid off because I'm really happy with the outcome. I particularly like the index and I think I will probably do a similar one for the music magazine.
However, I'm not so positive about the front cover. I like the picture and I appreciate that the banner was a really good choice, rather than placing a few sentences to cover the blank space. I think I could have done the masthead better. It's too simple and it's not commercially appealing. So that's something I'm going to improve when doing the music magazine. Although I liked the banner on the bottom, I think that if I were in need of doing another one for the music magazine, I would dedicate a bit more time on doing that to improve it from what I did on the school magazine. I also liked the little pictures on the bottom yet I think they contrasted with the banner. So for the music magazine I'll think a bit more about the layout so this doesn't happen.
Overall, I'm quite please with what I've produced. I now know what works and what doesn't and I have a notion of what I'm going to include in my magazine, what to improve and what will be left out.
