Preliminary Task

Before producing a music magazine, I will create a front cover and contents page article for a college magazine named 'Pulse'. Through doing this preliminary task, I hope to get a feel of the different programmes that I will be using over the next few months, such as photoshop and indesign.

These are my hand drawn drafts for both my Front Cover and Contents page, that will be made using photoshop.

Here are the images I will use for the front cover of my preliminary. The images were taken on different devices, some on digital cameras and some on an iphone.

Front cover

 

The outcome for this was very different to what I first intended as I feel my hand drawn draft title was basic, but challenging at the same time as find a font in which the 'e' showed a heart beat machine effect was very hard, therefore I decided to use dafont.com to find a similar font. Also I decided to use a side banner as a result of having to use a banner at the top, having a banner at the bottom as well as the top looked a bit too much and messy and less professional than I think it does at the side. I struggled with photoshop to begin with, but after playing around for a bit I started to get the hang of it. I used a grid structure but not all the time therefore some parts of the magazine do not fit in to the grid structure, I hope to improve this skill by the time that I create my main task magazine.

As I produced a college magazine, I decided to follow a similar layout to gossip magazines, to attract the target audience demographic of college students. The cover lines are very appropriate for the audience for example, 'Smoking Bans' as many students smoke and 'Students favourite holiday destinations' I think this will interest a wider audience as the majority of students want to go on their first holidays and read about things other than just college. I chose to use Red on the Masthead/Banner as it's a conventional magazine colour and the use of Yellow for headlines and cover lines as again it's conventional and makes the magazine stand out.

 

Below you can see the different images I will be using to construct my contents page for 'Pulse' magazine.

 

Contents Page

 

Again my contents page was very different to what I first intended in my hand drawn drafts. Because when doing this preliminary task, I did not have much knowledge of photoshop and all my ideas were quite tricky to do. I used common conventional colours, red, yellow, white and black. I decided to make the images surrounded by what appears to be a Polaroid frame, just to block them a bit. I think this maintains the brand identity carrying over from the front cover, however, it looks very empty and could have done with more stories inside. I hope by the time I produce my real contents page, I will have more advanced skills in using photoshop and other programmes.