Evaluation of College Magazine

For my college magazine front cover I wanted to create a realistic, professional looking front cover that promotes a positive lifestyle at Wyke College. The target audience for my magazine would be students both at college and in their last year of school that are looking into further education, aged between 15-18. With this in mind, I made sure that my front cover didn’t look too formal; as the audience would simply look at it and automatically feel that it was boring and they didn’t want to read it. However, I still included key information so that the magazine did actually inform the audience with good quality information while appealing to them visually. My main image on the cover shows classmate Luke Bolton holding the Wyke Student handbook in front of one of the buildings of the college. In my research into existing products, I found that the main images on the front covers are conventionally mid shots, showing the models from the waist up. I chose this shot because I wanted to make my product look as professional as possible therefore I needed to follow conventions. Also, it allows the audience to see what is behind the model well enough to see the blue skies and bright sunshine, which promotes the positive college lifestyle that I wanted. While deciding on what sell lines and stories I was going to include on my cover I visited the college website to look at current news about the college. I used my findings to create the three stories alongside my main image. I felt that this made my magazine more realistic as it was actually about real stories that are still fairly new to the audience. The font ‘Brannboll’ that I used for the masthead was one that I found on ‘dafont.com’ in the ‘old school’ section. I used this font because it was originally used to promote an American college sports team and is very similar to this ‘American College’ style of font. This will appeal to the British target audience, as American College’s are popular in a lot of popular television shows that are also aimed at the magazine’s target audience. Furthermore, I used the word ‘Freshman’ as it has recently been ‘fresher’s week’ for all university students therefore this will be something that college students who are looking into what universities to go to will be interested in. I followed a three colour scheme of red, white and black, which is a convention amongst magazines as it keeps the cover simplistic while still stylish. I chose these colours, as they are what students will be used to as traditionally when they are doing their work, they write in black ink on white paper, with comments/marking in red. Overall I feel that I stuck closely to my original planning for my magazine and that I successfully created a professional looking college magazine. I feel that I have managed my time well and have left enough time for each task while spending enough time on the design of my front cover so that it looks professional. I used various Photoshop techniques that I have learnt previously and picked up while the cover was in progress. If I were to have more time and produce another front cover, I would use a better main image with my model smiling instead of simply having a straight face, this would connote to the audience that the students at Wyke are happy with the experience the college provides. Furthermore, I would make the image more central, allowing for text on both sides of the image and making the image the central piece to the cover instead of to the right, as this would follow conventions I found in my research into existing products.