School magazine so far...

Planning
Name
The name of the magazine is Ridge. This is based around the idea that William Parker Spots College and Helenswood School are located on the ridge and are the 2 sites for the Parkwood 6th form.

Ideas
Our ideas for the magazine was to have a seasonal theme, meaning we would publish 3 a year excluding summer because no one is at school due to the summer holiday. The issue we are designing now is the Autumn one because that is the season we are currently in now. We decided that the magazine would be designed by the students for everyone to read so this means that they have the freedom to write what they want to a certain extent. We are going to make it interesting for the students to read as well as the adults to read because that would be a good way to promote the sixth form.

Values
The values of our magazine is to promote the success within the sixth form to all those who read it. The magazine will also so show the arts that happen within the sixth form and also the sporting side of it. The magazines is also made to show off the social side as well as the academic side of the sixth form, to show how well everyone gets on within the community.

Masthead Design
Our design for the masthead is a bold lettered theme with the colours you would associate with Autumn. We also had 6 wavy lines underneath with the same colours that were used in the title.

Number of Pages
We are designing our magazine to have 8 pages. This will be ideal for the amount of articles we are going to use and the size of them.


Images & Magazine

Compared to what has been written as the plan, I knew that the ideas that we had come up with were really too difficult to do on the computer with the limited resources I had to use. I had to do switch between photoshop and fireworks because I felt that fireworks had a lot more to offer when it came to editing.

The masthead had to change because I felt the original idea wasn't going to look very professional on the magazine with different colours for each letter. I still believe the theme is following the Autumn theme.



Original Image

Edited Image

I had to remove the background completely before I could carry on with the rest of the magazine. I made the image blue because I felt it was something different for a school magazine. I also felt that with the image being an alternative colour then it would stand out. The reason I believe students is that I used people they may know in the image which may see as interesting if they see people they know in the magazine.

"connecting places" - the reason I used that slogan was because the Ridge is the road that connects the two sites of the sixth form together. Also as it is a sixth form then people from other schools will join the people who were there as a school.

Contents Page

The contents page, I feel only just fits in with the magazine layout. The reason for this is because I did the contents page in a different programme to the front cover which meant I had different tools to use. Unlike the front cover, where I used Fireworks to design it; I used Indesign to design the contents page. More confident with fireworks, I felt that using Indesign was a learning curve for me because I have never used the programme before. Learning Indesign on a windows computer was slightly different to the version for apple mac computer, which I use. I couldn't convert the design and background from the frontcover so I had to use what I had available to me in Indesign.

Evaluation & Improvements

The first point that was made about the frontcover was the image on the cover possibly wasn't big enough and was slightly squashed.

The masthead on the front cover, people said was to big and it took up more room than needed. The front cover was very simple and didn't really attract the audience I was planning for. So in future, for the music magazine I will need to have a look at what the magazines aimed at teenagers do and design to get their attention. The contents page didn't follow the house design. This was because I couldn't find the same swatches that I used on the differen't programme, so I had to go with something that was slighty different, but intentionally was suppose to be the yellow colour that I used on the forntcover.

The bar along the bottom of the frontcover was a good idea, but needed to possibly put in topics that people may understand and which may make a connection with the audience.

The slogan "connecting places" and the issue date was in a font that was considered boring and that I realised that I needed to change the font, again to make it connect with the audience.
At the end of this I realised I needed to look harder at what other magazines have done to attract and speak out to their target audience.