College Magazine Evaluation

How does your magazine represent particular social groups? I chose to represent my social group, students, through the variety of

writing, images and symbols on the front cover and on the contents page. One of the first things you see when looking at my front cover is the puff in the top left corner which advertises the chance to win free gig tickets,

there is also photos of the venue included on the contents page. This shows that students are interested in the current music scene and gives the impression that the students are sociable and enjoy going out and having a good time. The main headline on my college magazine says

“pupil, student, illustrator. CCN student Victoria, grabs illustrating opportunity” This shows that a student at the college has gotten the

chance to become a professional illustrator. This then implies that the students at the college are very talented and creative and that they grab any opportunity that they can to achieve their dreams. The headline also shows that the students work hard to get to where they want to be which is shown through the “pupil, student, illustrator” part of the headline as it

shows the student has worked her way up to the top. This then gives a positive outlook on all the other students from the college and that they are all hard workers who take their education very seriously. The cover

line which advertises the magazine’s twitter account shows that the students can contact the magazine and can have an involvement in what

the magazine prints. This shows that the students care about their college and the other students who also attend. This promotes a sense of

community between the students and that the college atmosphere is friendly. The photo used on the cover is taken in the college library which

is a place used by all students. Placing the student who has achieved success in a place where any student can go shows that all students have

an equal chance to achieve their goals. I used both serif and san-serif fonts on my magazine front cover and contents page however, I used

sans-serif more. As the students are all young people, sans-serif associates with them more as it is seen as a more modern font compared

to serif which can be associated with being and ‘old fashioned’ font. I used a variety of different shades of orange colours on my magazine and contents page, not only did this follow my autumn coloured theme, but

the orange colour also gives positive connotations of happiness, enthusiasm and motivation which is used to present the attitudes of the

students.

What aspects of work are you pleased with and why? I am very pleased with my finished front cover and contents

page as I think it looks quite professional. I am happy with my magazine theme and I think it continues well over both the cover and the contents page. This is as I made sure to use the same font and colour scheme on both pages. I am

happy with my choice to mostly use sans-serif on my magazine but I also like that I used normal serif on my puff, this creates a bit of variety in the fonts and helps to makes my front cover look more interesting and not too repetitive.

Another technique I used to help make my pages more interesting was to change the colour and outline colour of the fonts. This way I could continue the same theme over

both pages but also not repeat myself too much. I am happy with my masthead and I think it stands out clearly on the

magazine cover, and that the drop shadow used to highlight the word ‘college’ really helps this. I think the photo’s I took

for my magazine were successful and look good on my magazine front cover and contents page. I think on my

contents page, the photos are arranged interestingly and that I have a good balance between images and text to help the page to not look boring. I also like how I added the folios

on the edge of the photos as it makes my magazine look professional and easy to see which image links to what

page.

What aspects of work could be improved and why? I think my contents page could be improved as there is quite a

lot of white space which looks quite empty and boring. I would improve this by maybe experiment with adding more colours to my theme, this would then help to make the blank, white areas on my contents page less boring. I would also try and make my

autumn theme more recognisable as other than the autumn colours, the only themed image I have on my magazine is a leaf. I think another change I could make, which would improve my

contents page would be to somehow change the font, maybe by making it larger so that it is easier to read as it is currently quite

difficult to read clearly. Although I am happy with the photo I used for my front cover, I think it could be improved. This is

because the light reflects off the student’s glasses and makes the area of one of the eyes unclear and lowers the quality of the

photo. To improve I would make sure to take lots of photos so that I can choose the best one to use for my magazine and to

also make sure that I am happy with the positioning of the student before I take the photo so that I could avoid similar mistakes again. The final change I would make would be to

maybe to use a different font for my masthead instead of using the same for the masthead and text. I think that this would

make the masthead come across more like a logo and would be more recognisable on the front of a magazine.