Preliminary Task - Contents Page

Preliminary Task Evaluation

I chose to aim my school magazine at a specific niche audience of sixth formers, in a girls' school. I chose purple as a house colour as it has connotations of being feminine and therefore fits with the target audience. I decided to team the purple with black and white, to break down the quirky impact the purple gives. In the mise-en-scene, I decided to have the school as a background on the cover page to represent the class of the school and i chose to dress the model featured in the medium close up, in the house colours to tie in with the house colours and brand identity of the magazine. The shot of the student is using direct address, which draws the eye to the cover of the magazine, attracting the audience.

My target audience of sixth formers will not have time to read lots of writing, so I decided to make the tone of the magazine short and snappy, using minimal amount of text so that the audience would be more inclined to read. On my contents page i decided to position the contents around the image of a clock to make it seem more appealing to read, also the spread out effect makes the copy look more visually pleasing and gives the illusion that there is less text, so makes it more readable. On the cover page, I used cover lines to interest the audience as to what might be featured inside the magazine. Next time i would add more cover lines to interest the demographic more; I had difficulty adding cover lines effectively, as with the particular photograph I had featured on the front cover, not many colours would stand out against the background, which is very necessary for cover lines to jump out and grasp the audiences attention.

On my contents page, I decided to have the main art, as a clock as this has connotations of school, time and organisation so therefore links very well to what the magazine is meant to represent. I also thought this would be very effective as I could use the clock numbers as page references. Caused by a lack of professional software at hand at the time, i had to crop the image of the clock using Serif pageplus, which was very time consuming, because of the circular shape. Maybe for my real task for photo manipulation, I should use a programme such as Photoshop. To add more definition to the black, white and red colours in the artwork of the clock and piano, I edited the photos by boosting the contrast, so that the black, white and red would really contrast and stand out from eachother, giving a clean-cut look. Next time, when taking photographs I need to think and plan out more on the lighting, as on the cover with the image of the books, there is a noticeable glare of light as well as a reflection from the sun on the medium close up of a student.

I feel that my images were very appropriate, they all had a link to school life and fitted in with the theme of the magazine very well.