My College Magazine Front Cover Evaluation

My Magazine Front Cover Design

This is the magazine front cover that I designed. I took the main image with the Bodmin College logo in the background as I felt having the college logo in the picture would have a better effect and would make a better background than just a plain wall. After evaluating this cover I have realised that using this as my background does not look professional and also looks slightly messy. I have learnt from this and when creating my music magazine I will make sure I use a plain/neutral background. Also I think the main subject of the image should be cropped out of the natural background and that the college logo should be put on after separately because not only will this look more professional and follow conventions of other magazines, the model in my image is covering up some of the logo meaning that it is not clear and easy to see. Another convention of this magazine that I will definitely be planning more on my main task is the colour scheme. In this magazine the colour scheme I used was black and red which is only shown on the text I used as there is no other things on the magazine (such as shapes, other images etc). I think this looks unprofessional as it is just plain red and plain black, there is no gradients or variations of these colours, just the plain, normal colours. Although, one of the reasons why the colour scheme looks so bad may be because the font/text I used is bad. I used a font I found on dafont.com which I edited on photoshop to get rid of the background and to change the colour/size but because I cut it out to get rid of the background I was left with white edges around the text which looks really unprofessional and messy. Another reason why this magazine looks unprofessional and incomplete is because of the lack of text and images on it. To make it better I could've added more shapes as a background for a couple of my teasers, used a better, more suitable font and generally just followed conventions of professional, popular magazines. It was difficult to address the target audience as my audience are just students at the college and my magazine doesn't acknowledge that they are specialised in anything etc whereas the audience of a music magazine obviously does. 

Skills that I need to improve on during creating my main task are to research magazines of the same genre and analyse them to find the common conventions and then follow them more accurately, photoshop skills so that I can learn how to create a more professional magazine and also something I would gain from analysing style models is how to make the lay out more professional, which fonts look more professional and common conventions to include in my cover, contents page and double page spread. Another main skill I need to improve on is my photography and lighting skills which is also something I will gain from looking at style models and also through experimentation.

 I do not think this is a strong magazine front cover as it just doesn't look like a generic magazine front cover because of factors such as the colour scheme, the masthead, the font I chose etc. For my music magazine front cover I will make sure I create a much stronger front cover that follows all the generic conventions of that genre.