Preliminary Task: Page Design Sketches

After doing some rough sketched designs of three contents pages and three front covers, I have decided to opt for "Cover 2" and "Contents 1" for my Preliminary piece.

Preliminary Task: Planning my magazine

Colour Schemes:

My school's uniform is green and yellow themed, with this in mind I have chosen green to be my main colour of my school magazine. I wanted to produce a magazine for the Sixth Form section of the school so that means I'm straying away from the regal and classic colours like Gold and instead going for a more trendy and casual colours. I've come to the decision of using a mixture of greens with one other main colour (for example purple or blue) for my colour scheme with a white or black font.
Here is my first colour scheme design idea:

Here is my second colour scheme design idea:

My personal preference is to go with the purple, as I believe it seems a bit less formal, it actually sits well with the green and looks like they should fit together however the blue seems like it stands out too much and takes away from the green, also the white font is far easier on the eye and easier to read than the black. My chosen colour scheme is Green for the background colour, purple for the secondary body colour and a white font.

Font Styles:

I'm looking for a Sans Serif font as I'm looking for an informal and more casual magazine look as it's targeted at Sixth Form students (Aged 16 - 18) rather than having the formal magazine targeted at the parents of the students which would most likely have Serif font.

Here are four Sans Serif fonts from top to bottom: Coolvetica, AgencyFB, Compass and Sansation. I think that Coolvetica is slightly too thick and bold to be used as a font throughout a magazine. AgencyFB is a good font in my opinion, it's rigid but still looks casual and trendy with a slight futuristic look to it. Compass looks like a font that would be on make up packaging, a bit too feminine. Sansation is also a nice font but think over personal preference I'm going to choose AgencyFB as it's thinner and looks more modern and not very mainstream, the other forms all look a bit similar.

Preliminary Task: Contents Page Research

Preliminary Task: Front Cover Research

The typography used in this front cover are all Sans Serif fonts, this gives a casual feel and it also feels like it's targeted at young adults and new families which coincides with the photo of the children as they are young and also the Masthead is "Prep School". The tablets and laptops featured in the photo are there to advertise and show off the money, technology and resources this school has to offer to the target audiences children. With all the children on the tablets and smiling it implies that it's a happy learning environment and a pleasant place to be, so obviously the purpose of the photo on the front cover. The colour scheme used is blues, which is the same as the uniform blazer and the chairs in the photo. Blue is also a very easy colour on the eye and does not appear garish.

The layout is quite cluttered in comparison to the other front cover, this cover features much more text, a criticism of that would be that some of the text overlaps the photo of the two student and I think it would look a lot more professional and it also eliminates any complications with text not being readable on the background. The camerawork used is a medium shot of one female student in a three quarter stance and a male student, taller, stood behind her. If he was stood in front his height would be significantly taller in comparison so it's good that he is behind as it balances the photo well. The fonts used are also Sans Serifs and this magazine looks like it's targeted at the students, probably sixth form, rather than the parents. However the colour scheme of deep purples and blacks makes it very elegant and stylish, however the font colour choices seem a bit random with some secondary text in purple with the title in black but then on the left hand side there is just black text with no purple title which seems lazy or a mistake.

Introduction

My name is Jack Girvin and my task is to create a music magazine front cover, contents and double page spread that follows the conventions of real media products. To help me prepare for the music magazine I am undergoing a preliminary task to create a front page and contents page.

Candidate Number: 2244
Centre Number: 55235

The set brief is as follows: 

Print 

Preliminary exercise: 
using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a 
new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a DTP mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of the program. 

Main task: 
the front page, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine (if done as a group task, each member of the group to produce an individual edition of the magazine, following the same house style). Maximum four members to a group. 
All images and text used must be original, produced by the candidate(s), minimum of FOUR images per candidate.

Marking

The centre will be expected to allocate marks according to four levels for each of three categories: 
 Research and Planning 
 Construction 
 Evaluation