Preliminary Task to Actual Magazine: My Progression

Masthead • Mastheads As you can probably see, there has been a big

improvement regarding the two magazine mastheads. I found out how to employ more effects for my music magazine masthead; Included a drop shadow and an inner shadow and used a better font. With my prelim masthead, I was oblivious to all these effects and so the masthead looks pretty basic.

Front Cover • Front Cover The front covers are so different

and I think there are visible improvements. I think one change is the use of colour. Some of the colours I use on my prelim cover are quite different and don’t fit together as well as they could. There are also issues regarding colours not standing out against the image. I think with the strong colours used on my music magazine cover stand out much better from the background image and the text is a much better size and therefore more visible to the audience., there are similarities with the layout because what hasn’t changed, is that I want the cover to be under-crowded and easily readable. I think that overall the cover looks much more professional and stands out much better than the school magazine cover. I’m happy about this because I like to see that I have made some improvement.

Images • ImagesI think the image on the cover of my

school magazine is much more interesting because the pose is something unique and different whereas the image on the cover of my music magazine is more straight-forward and slightly unimaginative. The cover is the thing that the audience will see first so I realised from my prelim that I needed to think hard about the image I would use for my cover. It was similar story for the contents page. I found that both of the smaller images on the contents page of the school magazine were quite boring because they were very basic so I decided that for my music magazine I wanted to be more imaginative with poses and therefore follow the conventions of real music magazines. As you can see, there has been a big improvement image-wise from my prelim task to my actual magazine. I think that when I looked back at my prelim, I was able to see where the weak areas were and I was therefore able to improve for my music magazine.

Content • the contents pages are very similar but vastly

different. I kept the same layout because I thought it made the page look spacious and organised. There are loads of elements that have improvements, however. One thing that I think has definitely improved is the page heading because on my prelim contents page, the word ‘Contents’ is very big which it shouldn’t be seeing as it is the second most important page in any magazine. I also found that I had no sub-sectionheadings. I think also with my music magazine, it is easier to distinguish between the article headings, the summaries and thepage numbers as they are the first things you read, which I found from my research, is veryimportant as it’s a chance to communicate with the audience. One thing I didn’t do on my prelim was include a webaddress on the page which I should have done. Because I missed things out like this in the prelim, I was able toremember to include them in my music magazine which is where they really count.