PRELIMINARY PROJECT: Evaluation.

Evaluation

While putting together my own magazine cover, I learnt a lot about the different features that make a magazine cover.  In learning this, it helped me to decide what conventions that I needed to include on my own magazine. A few of the conventions that I featured on my magazine cover were a masthead, main image, promotions banner and cover lines. The reason I chose these conventions to use was because I felt that these are the main and important conventions on a magazine front cover that draw the reader in. The most challenging convention that I used, personally, was the cover lines. I felt this one because it was challenging to come up with feature articles that would appeal to all students that were to read the magazine. However, this challenge was overcome by simply giving out a questionnaire for some students to fill out, with questions such as “What do you worry about”, to find out what things they cared about and what things they wanted more information on.

While actually designing my magazine front cover, I used my questionnaire to decide what went on my front cover. For example my main image is of a 16 year old girl in sixth form at the park on a swing. The reason behind my main image was to show that, even when you are with lots of work to do, it is still important to have some fun.  Deciding what colours to use was also challenging as I had to pick colours that work for my target audience, which was male and females. In the end I decided to go with unisex colours, that way the colours didn't just appeal to the one gender.

Overall, I feel that my magazine front cover was successful. I included things that were appropriate for my target audience by including things that they asked for and felt was needed for a sixth form magazine. I fell that I could have made this better. To make this better, I would perhaps spend more time on the bigger things, such as the photography and the actual designing of the magazine than spending more time on things that didn’t need as much detail as what other things do.

I would say that I need to work on dividing up my time better. For example, as I mentioned, I would spend more time on the bigger things that need doing instead of wasting time on the things that maybe didn’t need as much time spent on it. I would also say that I need to gain a bigger understanding of media terms, this way it will make things simpler for me in the future. In addition to these, I would also check to make sure that my blog works properly before trying to upload my work, because when I tried to upload my preliminary task, I tried to upload it all at once and my blog wasn’t working properly yet.