Prelim

This is my finished preliminary piece - the front cover for a school magazine. I thought it would be appropriate to use an image of a student on the front cover, as this would be someone the target audience could relate to: students may not have liked a picture of a teacher on the front, as it may have made the magazine less personal or more authoritative. With the image, I did very little to edit the picture as I wanted to make it seem as realistic as possible, as though it could be any student. I wanted the person in the photograph to look academic, but still casual, as I believe this gives off a positive impression of the school: you can learn, but still be yourself. I decided that a good way to show this would be to have an image of someone reading and looking studious.

My magazine is aimed at Sixth Form students, so it would have been inappropriate to have an image of somebody in a school uniform; I also wanted my subject to be wearing reasonably plain clothing, so as not to give an impression of disorder through a messily dressed student.
I chose to keep the name of the magazine relatively plain and simple, so I picked "School Smart" because I liked the used of alliteration and felt that it directly informed readers that this would be an academic magazine.
The colour scheme of the page is pretty straightforward, as I wanted to send a positive, simplistic view of my magazine to the audience; I chose red and blue because they are the school colours, and black because it made the words stand out clearly on the page.
I decided that, in order to make my magazine more appealing, I would offer my readers a study guide pull-out, as I felt that this would be useful to the targeted audience and may compel them to read the magazine. Also, because I wanted this magazine to be widely available to members of the school, I decided against giving my magazine a price and would offer it free to students - I felt that this would be more appealing to students, as they may not want to pay for it.
To encourage the audience to read the magazine, I chose to use red and blue over a black background for eyecatching articles, in order for them to stand out against the page. I also picked topics which I felt the students would be interested in, but kept them relatively school-related as opposed to off-topic articles about fashion, etc. which would not be relevant for an academic magazine.




I also did a mock-up of a contents page as part of my preliminary piece, to give an idea of what I would do if I did make more of this magazine.

Above is shown the layout I would use for a contents page for this magazine. The title would be located in the top-left corner, using the same colours as were used on the front cover of the school magazine. I would primarily use images on this page, as images would grab the attention of the reader more directly than large bulks of text: the actual contents would be displayed down the right-hand side, next to images which would correspond to different sections of the magazine (I would also choose to use little blocks with numbers in over the images, which would quickly tell the reader which page to turn to for that particular section). I also think it would bring a more personal element to the magazine if I were to include a large picture of the people involved in the school magazine (i.e. the students who write the columns) as it would perhaps encourage readers to want to get involved, and to have their picture included. In the top right-hand corner I think it would be a nice touch to place a picture of the editor of the magazine - which ideally would be a teacher, as I feel this would show positivity between students and staff working together.