prelim magazine contents page

My contents page follows the layout of my prelim fairly closely. I am fairly pleased with this page and I think that it has turned out better than my front cover, although I still don’t think that its qite as good as I could possibly make it, there is still room for improvement for when I create my music magazine contents page.

prelim school magazine front cover

This is the finished front cover of my prelim school magazine task. While not identical, it mostly sticks to my front cover mock up. I have abandoned some of the features of the newsletters  that I thought were ineffective such as lack of images and long columns of text on the front cover in favour of other features that make it look more like a magazine, such as a background image. While I think it has turned out OK, I think there is still room for improvement in terms of making it look more professional. This prelim task front cover has served as a good practice task in preparation for my music magazine front cover.

photoshop edits

I have decided on the 4 photos I will use for my preliminary task magazines front cover and contents page. The first 3 are fairly decent photos, and I felt that their quality didn't need too be massively improved in Photoshop. The only one that I have edited is the last one. I used the clone stamp tool to erase the mobile phone on the desk simply to make the schools workplace look a little bit more professional, I found this fairly easy, especially since I already practiced using the clone stamp tool, among other tools in Photoshop, in preparation for this task. Overall I am pleased with the final quality of all 4 pictures for my school magazine.

my school magazine mock ups

After creating mock-ups of two pre-existing music magazines and analysing two school newsletters, I created a mock up for my school magazine, applying the common elements I have found in music magazines and avoiding some of the negative aspects I have gathered from the school newsletters in order to give my school magazine a more professional feel to it. I have used guides in Microsoft publisher in order to better level out my magazines presentation. I will use a colour scheme of red blue and white as they are they are the schools signature colours. The central image of my front cover will also function as my background, this image will be of a science practical experiment, firstly as it will relate to the main contents of my magazine, and secondly because it will fit with my magazines ideology of showcasing Deyes as a school with a diverse range of academic subjects. The rest of the contents on this page will consist of a masthead, headlines about the main article and a summary of what’s inside which may draw the interest of the reader.

The contents page is a fairly simple layout, basically just two columns of lists of page numbers, with surrounding pictures that relate to some of the stories in order to grab the reader’s attention.

 

first preliminary photographs

Above are the photos I took during the photo-shoot for my preliminary school magazine task. As many of them are in the same location, I will have to sort through them and decide which 4 will be best for my magazine. I will also consider that some of them may have to undergo some editing in Photoshop in order to make them look more professional. 

photoshop tasks

Seeing as I will likely have to use photoshop for my music magazine task and school newsletter prelim task, I have undergone some practice with the system. Above is a simple crop I have performed in order to erase some of the empty space in the image. Below is an image that I have edited the lighting of in order to make it more clearly visable.

On this image I have used the clone stamp tool to erase all the bottles other than the centre bottle from the image. Overall, I found Photoshop fairly easy to adapt to, as it will be important to know how to use in order to complete my prelim task, as well as my school magazine task.

magazine mock ups

These are two mock-ups of the magazines Q and kerrang which will help me better understand and utilise the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. Starting with the Q, the typical conventions of a magazine are all present such as masthead, cover lines, central image bar code, price and so forth. What’s interesting about this cover is that nearly all of the text is in all capitals, except for the main cover line, which you would ordinarily expect to be all capitals. The whole page uses a very limited pallet of colours using only black white and red. In fact aside from the central image and one other small one in the top right corner, the cover is mostly text. One other notable part of the cover is that the central image partially overlaps the masthead, presumably because the ‘Q’ logo is already recognisable to its target audience and therefore doesn’t need to be shown in full.

In contrast to Q’s front cover which had very few images, kerrang’s cover is filled with images aside from the central one. While the main two colours used on this cover are white and purple, many more colours are utilised here than on Q’s cover. There is a lot less empty space in general on this cover as its filled with cover pictures and cover lines, however it also looks a little more cluttered than Q’s cover which may be because the two magazines are targeted to different audiences. Similar to Q, the masthead of kerrang is covered by the central image, again implying that the masthead doesn’t need to be fully shown because the target audience is already familiar with it. Finally, every single line of text shown on kerrang’s cover is in a bold capital sans serif font, which may be due to the magazines ‘in-your-face’ house style, also shown by the lack of unused space.   

Theorists

Cohen's Morel Panic dictates that there will always be a social group portrayed in the media to come across as a threat to society. This also involves the controlling of folk devils in society or representing the behaviour of particular groups as a threat to society. This can cause Panics to erupt dramatically that are difficult to sustain and cause negative effects. The morel panic is often achieved through wild exaggeration of evidence. Not only the number of people involved but also the scale of the problem.

Richard Dyers Star Theory states that the media create stars, people whose name becomes well known to media institutions and this can become quite critical to their careers. By creating a star, products of media can bank on that persons 'stardom' and assume that people will consume their media, be it music or any kind of product, solely because the star is attached to it.


Laura Mulveys feminist theory claimed that women in Hollywood Films are a figure of desire and men are more dominant in the roles they played as were the spectators. Mulvey suggested that women were presented through the media in two ways, voyeuristically and fetishistcally, voyeuristic being when they are portrayed merely as eye candy and fetishistically when they are portrayed as an icon. These terms are two forms of the male gaze theory which Laura Mulvey suggested was when films forced women into perspective of the male audience, like by putting a woman in a film purely for sex appeal.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs, a sign being something that represents something other than itself. There are two theorists most commonly associated with semiotics; they are Ferdinand de Saussure 1857-1913, and Charles Sander Pierce 1839-1914.

Saussure’s dyadic semiotic system argues that signs don’t represent things for any particular reason and that when taken out of context objects, ideas and concepts are abstract and only has significance or meaning when they are give a sign to represent them.

Pierces theory on the other hand, argues that all signs fall within three categories, an index, icon or symbol. An index means that the sign does not have an arbitrary signifier (for example, smoke may suggest fire but does not mean that there is a fire). An icon is a fake representative of a real object, like a picture or a photograph. A symbol is completely conventional like a number or a letter.

Now, when creating my magazine, I can take signs and semiotics into account to better convey my message.

2nd newsletter evaluation

For my second newsletter evaluation, I will look at Alsop High’s newsletter. The first notable aspect of the front cover is that aside from the logos at the bottom, it is completely black and white, which creates a very boring looking front cover regardless of audience, and risks disinteresting the reader immediately. Like the Deyes newsletter, the page begins with a message from the head teacher, however this one is shorter and more concise than the Deyes message, helping to make the page look less text heavy despite the fact that there are nearly no images on the page. The image beside the message is of the school; however inside the same box as the image is the date of the newsletters release, though there is a lot of blank space underneath it not being used. This has made me realise that I should more carefully consider my image placement in correlation to my text, as it could potentially lead to wasted white space. Below are a list of relevant dates to the students, which like the message from the head is presented nice and concisely. The rest of the pages text is divided up with sub-headings nicely enough so that the newsletter looks professional without presenting the reader with one long boring chunk of text consuming the bottom half of the page. The content consists of updates on recent school events such as the national science week, as well as of school regulations regarding uniforms, jewellery, punctuality and so forth. This content suggests that the newsletter is aimed more towards the older students than the parents but without directly addressing them, and by presenting this information to them in a mature format like this, the student readers wouldn’t feel patronised (though on the other hand, a formal layout like this, plain text and lack of colours may even discourage older students from reading this). Overall, this newsletter front cover has been very helpful to me in that it has given me reason to think about the placement of my text and images and how I present my text.

Deyes High School newsletter evaluation

The front page of the Deyes high newsletter is laid out with the schools badge and name across the top and the title of the newsletter "deyes of our life" and the date below. Below that in smaller text is a list of notable school events in the coming week, followed by a message from the head. The newsletter utilises a colour pallet of red and a range of blues (coinciding with the school badge) and yellow text. Underneath is a message from the head teacher, which indicates the newsletters target audience is the parents of the students, as apposed to students themselves because the message is only informative to parents.

What follows however is a page showing the forms with the best attendance in each year group, as well as maths tips, this information seems more directed towards students than parents, therefore content, along with the cartoon image on the same page, suggests that the newsletter is for students somewhat contrasting with the previous page which indicated that the newsletter was aimed at parents through its content.

Further into the newsletter is a page featuring ideas and advice concerning healthy packed lunches which at face value is something that could be targeted to both students and parents. However the way it is written is more to the parents than the students, as it even directly addresses them as parents. This also creates a confliction about who the target of this newsletter is, as something like ideas for packed lunches could easily be presented to both audiences, but by addressing only one of those audiences directly it singles out the other. It is also worth mentioning that while pages like this one do have pictures, others (such as more from the head) do not and entire pages are just reams of text, which unbalances the newsletter and could potentially bore both students and parents.

The final page of the newsletter also seems to have been created with parents in mind. Again, there are no images present and the page consists of only a long ream of text making the page look more mature and suited for parent (though as previously mentioned, even parents may be disinterested by this layout). The subject of the page is also exclusively directed at parents as it talks about changes in the education system and how parents can prepare their children for it. However whereas previous pages referred to the parents directly, this page makes an even worse mistake of referring to the students in the third person, further alienating them from this pages content, and possible making them feel patronised. Overall, while the majority of the pages are clearly aimed at parent’s there is some oddly placed content that seems to cater more to students. This has made me consider that when creating my own newsletter and magazine I must consider my target audience and cater to them specifically and thoroughly to avoid alienating them or losing their interest.