Evaluation of College Magazine

This is my new amended Front cover of my college magazine, I have changed the copyrighted image of a pumpkin to an original image of a hallween party.

My task was to create a college magazine front cover and draft a contents page. I decided to call my magazine ‘Wyke Focus’ this was to show what the contents of the magazine were about (Wyke associated). This magazine had to represent this college in a very positive way and had to have appropriate stories. I thought of many ideas for mastheads, images, selling lines and planned out a draft of my front cover. I then had to do some research into the happenings at wyke and think of some ideas for my cover lines. I then compared 2 other college magazines; ‘GX magazine’ and ‘College Lifestyle’  this gave me ideas as to what is conventional and unconventional. It helped me realise how to make your magazine attractive to the chosen audience.

     My college magazine uses many different forms of conventions such as putting a large bold masthead at the top of the front cover, I chose ‘Wyke Focus’ as this makes it clear as to what the magazine is actually about. I also chose to put the barcode at the bottom left hand corner of the front cover along with the price and college logo in the other corner. I used Purple and a yellowy green colour for my text as this represents Wyke college as it matches the Wyke logo. I put 2 more images along the left third of the front cover which is also a convention of a real magazine. The image of the girl on the laptop was taken to represent someone who is good at media, the other image of the pumpkin was to link in with the month (October) and the fact that there is a Halloween party nearby. I think my main image challenges forms and conventions of a real magazine because usually the model would be smiling but I decided to create a more peaceful image of somebody studying in the new grounds, I chose this photograph out of many because it promotes wyke in a more positive way that the other photos as it is a lot lighter and looks very attractive.

    My magazine doesn’t really represent particular social groups but it does represent students in a different way to usual, it actually shows the student studying in a peaceful environment and not with friends and it doesn’t show any teachers this shows students in a different way it shows them actually working by themselves which is more true to life because student do have to study by themselves a lot.

    The audience for my magazine is students mainly aged between 16 and 21 who live in Hull or the East Riding. This could also attract other students who don’t go to wyke who would like to know what the wyke lifestyle is like encase they decide to come to wyke in the future. The audience could also be staff at Wyke as they may want to know what’s going on at the college and what students are getting up to. Parents may also want to read this because they may want to know what there son/daughter is doing at college and what goes on whilst they are there.

     I used many conventions to attract my audience such as using a bright bold masthead and using other images of goings on at the college. I also chose a bright picture and short snappy cover lines to attract other students to read it.

    I used Adobe Photoshop to construct my front cover college magazine and draft of the contents page. I used a digital camera to take original images of students at Wyke college and chose which images out of the ones I took were best suited to the front cover of my magazine. When I chose my final picture I used image adjustments on photo shop to change the brightness and contrast of the photograph to make it look a lot brighter and more colourful. I created boxes to put the other images in and changed the colours and the fonts to make them represent wyke. I chose to change the colour of the box with the pumpkin in to black and changed the font and the font colour to red to make it represent Halloween as scary and sinister. I cut out a purple star and decided to change the colour to purple and put the text inside and used that as the main cover line. I think that my magazine was very simple to create and is looks very effective.

     In comparison to the other two college magazines I analysed, I believe that my magazine is more like a college magazine than ‘GX magazine’ because it shows students in a more positive manor and is a lot more attractive and colourful, I think that this widens the range of audience. My magazine does not look as professional as ‘College lifestyle’ because ‘College lifestyle’ is more glossy were as my magazine looks as though a student has actually created it themselves and I think that this is more effective and will be more attractive to other students. I wanted to represent the college in a positive way and I believe I have done that as it shows success, education, happiness and positivity.