Preliminary Task - Front Cover Analysis

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By Emma Hall

This is my banner, which shows the date and edition.

This is my masthead, which is the name of the magazine, and uses a house style of blue.

This is a list of other stories in the magazine. They use appropriate Leading and Kerning in a Sans Serif font.\

This is my cover story mid-shot, with the photograph I chose from my shoot.

 This is my strap line which details my cover story.

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My front cover has a good layout, in my opinion, and the different elements do complement each other. Also, I think the cover story was a good choice, as it was simple, and only required the subject to hold some tickets, to make the photograph relevant to the story. However, I think the font types used are a bit boring and not very inviting or inspiring, especially on the strap line. The blue colour works well, I think to stand out from the background picture, whilst still having a sense of cohesion, ans the light blue complements the green grass and sunny lighting. On the other hand, the flash, I think, is not in an appropriate colour. Although the orange makes it stand out from the other elements and draws the reader's eye to it, the colour is a bit too different from the rest of the magazine's colour palette, and so doesn't quite fit in. I chose to put the masthead 'On Form', in a box, so that it would look different from the strap line, and not just be another horizontal line of text. This would have worked better, I think, if either the box was a slightly different shade of blue, or had some kind of effect on it like an embossed outer edge, of some kind of gradient fill, as this would make the box (and by extension the masthead) look more interesting and sophisticated than just a plain box.

Transferring my paper plan onto Adobe Photoshop was quite simple, overall, though there had to be some natural alterations, such as changing the wording of the stories to fit around the photo. Also, it was difficult to find font types on the programme to match what I had in mind when designing the cover. I tried to keep in my my plan during the photo shoot, and realised I had to keep adjusting to make sure there was room for things like a banner and a masthead. However, when I opened my photo up into Adobe, it wasn't exactly A4 size, like blank magazine cover, so it had to be expanded to fit, which meant some portions of the photograph were lost. This I turn meant my careful adjustments during the photo shoot were almost obsolete, and I had to try and work round the new expanded image.

By looking at real school magazines like this one, I can see that there are more sophisticated techniques I could employ to make my magazine look more professional, like using translucent background to enable the reader to still see the photograph underneath. This example also shows that banners do not have to be in straight lines, and that linking the colours right throughout he magazine cover really helps blend the different elements together. It also includes the school's logo, which immediately make the cover look more official.The writing 'What's Going On @' is also along the line of the banner, which is an inventive use of text which I could use to make in conjuncture with a slanted banner to make a more interesting cover.