Wednesday, 3 October 2012

analysis of front cover

Analysis 1



Colour scheme;
Red + white- Contrasting colours makes the text easier to see and appeal more to a youthful audience as the colours are give a more modern and fresh look to the cover.


The central image is a photo of a painting on a wall, again seems modern and again appeals to a more younger audience, it also relates to one of the sections on the bottom of the page that is entitled “street art”


The puff advertises the opportunity to win “weekend offender goodies” this is interesting because we usually connote the word “offender” as being a criminal. So the fact that you can win “criminal” goodies is intriguing.

The banner at the bottom advertises what is going to be in the magazine.

This feature is usually used on websites as a way of navigation.
The layout of the magazine cover seems clear and quiet, the simplicity of the cover, could possibly be showing the attempt of being more sophisticated and to the point. 




The colour scheme chosen is almsot identical to the front cover- except this has alot more blue mixed in with the red and white, however the white is used for the background, making the double spread look much cleaner and modern than most content pages.

The layout of the page is clear to read and easily laid out, and looks like its divided into sections, with regulars and listings put into the bottom right hand corner, which could suggest that this is where they are placed regularly in the issue, this further connotes the success and that these must be the sort of things that the readers prefer to look at.

After looking into a bit more detail, I was able to eventually see the blue highlights amongst the text (I have pretty bad eyesight and the best quality image I could get is pretty blurry) The blue stands out from the white background and also contrasts with thew orange, allowing it to be more visible- on better quality images!


Analysis 2:


Media_Student_Magazine_Example.jpg

The layout of the page is extremely blank, not even containing many of the generic conventions- the only ones really features are the central image, brand names, and a small puff.

As a result of the plain cover- the colour scheme/ house style is also pretty bland, the only colours are black, red, white and orange,however they do contrast from the brightness from the photo, allowing the viewer to see them much clearer.


The only way visible that the photo relates to anything on the cover is the fact that in that small puff it says "New term.." this shows us that this is a new year issue since the model has snow on her hair, and the snow-blue filter that photos get when it has been snowing.




Monday, 1 October 2012

Work Flow.

During the first week of working on this project I'm hoping to trudge my way through:

  • Identifying the generic conventions of student/college magazines.
  • Analyse TWO front covers of existing student magazines.
  • And Finally conduct a focus group to establish what the student audience wants to gain (ect) from this new magazine.


The second weeks expectation to have hopefully have done;

  • Produce drafts and mock up versions of the front cover and the contents page.
  • Begin the final designs of the for the front cover.
Produced photos for the front cover.

On the final week of the project/task I will be just finishing up the the cover and contents pages ready for the project deadline (17th October).

Introduction to Preliminary task.

Using a publishing and an image manipulation program, we were instructed to produce the front cover of  new college/student magazine that must feature;
-A medium close-up photo of a student.
-Appropriate laid out text.
-A masthead.

We also have to create a mock of the contents page for the magazine aswell.