My final design: School Magazine Cover

This is my final copy of my school magazine front cover. Overall, I am quite pleased with my front cover for a first attempt, and I am aware of the areas in which I could have improved. In my opinion, and also asking others, the areas that could have been improved are the colours; for example my subject's clothing is very dark and similarly is the laptop. Seeing as my image was designed to cover 2/3 of the page, this is quite a limiting factor. The lighting was also not brilliant, as made sure I stayed away from using flash as I did not want my cover to look particularly unnatural, however it meant the cover was quite dark. This was because it was quite a dark, autumn day which I could not help, however I did try to improve this by the use of Photoshop. I changed the brightness and the saturation, so it was clearer on the page. Although, obviously this made the front cover look quite unnatural, which was exactly what I was trying not to achieve; therefore I feel this particular aspect was very unsuccessful. Also, the fonts were spaced quite closely together, by which meaning the front cover looks slightly cluttered, and therefore unprofessional. On the other hand, I feel my cover succeeded in achieving the sole object, which was to design a front cover appropriate for a school magazine. Despite the colours being dark, they did match the colours used, for example the dark blue font matched my subject's dark blue clothng. I also though that the proportions of the laptop to the size of my subject was achieved well, as I did have trouble with the proportions and angling of the laptop. With the idea of having an image incorporated onto the laptop screen, I think it was quite successful. From the feedback I received, people seemed to like the "imaginative" idea, and said it worked well. Yet, after browsing through other media studies portfolios of my classmates, the simpler ideas were sometimes more effective. I possibly tried to overcomplicate the design for my first ever attempt, and therefore problems such as angling, proportions etc meant my front cover design was slightly weaker than it could have potentially been.
Overall, I am quite happy with the look of my magazine front cover, although if i were to do this project again, I definitely would have reconsidered the lighting.


Manipulating my magazine front cover.


This was the first step I took when manipulating the image for my magazine front cover. I used Photoshop to paste the image onto the screen of the laptop, to show school students enjoying themselves with the school's music equipment. I used the 'warp' tool on Photoshop so the image I pasted in fitted the laptop screen exactly, making it look like it was really on the screen. I like the contrast between the bright image I pasted onto the laptop, against the shot of my subject. However, the strong contrast might attract too much attention to the image on the laptop alone, meaning less attention is drawn to my subject Fiona's face.