Preliminary Task Evaluation

For my preliminary task I have made a front page and a contents page for a hypothetical school magazine. To help me with this I analysed other magazine covers and contents pages, one of which called Fusion.

I took certain conventions from it and ignored others because it had certain things appealing about it for a school magazine and others that weren’t. For instance, the front cover of my school magazine mimics the choice of image that Fusion made where there’s a big picture of someone’s face with a filter on it to make it look outstanding and eye-catching. I also tried hard to make it so that the text would stand out the exact amount I wanted it to, enough to be seen but not draw attention away from the main picture. I don’t think Fusion did a good job at this because in certain parts of the front cover there would be text in the way of the picture in very bright colours. I remedied this by giving the text I want people to see when they first glance a brighter colour, and the text that’s less important dark red text which can be read, but doesn’t draw attention away where attention is due.

The main target for this task was school kids, be it teen or toddler. I made the front cover picture the picture of a fictional rapper to appeal to a younger generation and I added a sympathetic agony uncle to attract girls, because agony aunt/uncle sections in magazines are quite popular throughout the female genre. As far as class is concerned I tried to make it look more middle class for my pictures, with the exception of the rapper picture. Making the magazine seem more “posh” gives a school a better look, so it could attract people to take part in extra curricular activities. The better and more “posh” the magazine makes the school look the higher parents and other adults would think of the school at hand. That is how I target children, parents, teachers and individual genders.

The type of school that would distribute my magazine would be ones that want to advertise extra curricular activities in order to encourage their students, possibly a school that specialises in one particular extra curricular activity such as an acting academy or a football training school etc. I aimed the magazine to appeal to around 12-18 year olds as well, the age where people are less juvenile and would take in the content. That is what I would market my magazine to.

I would use the chance to get into the magazine itself as a marketing ploy to get people to buy my magazine. For example, in the contents and front page it states that there are things for people to participate in such as sports, writing in to the resident agony uncle, competitions etc. People would buy the magazine just to see if they had won anything or had been mentioned at all in the magazine. This would definitely get some people buying, along with the people who would buy the magazine for the content as well as to enter competitions and have their photo taken and featured in an article would get a respectable amount of people wanting to buy.

From my experiences so far I have learnt the complexities of taking the perfect picture, the art of photo manipulation in PhotoShop e.g. clone stamping people’s blemishes out of pictures, how to avoid bouncing light beams in pictures by choosing whether a flash or an artificial light is best suitable and many other useful tools. My experiences in this preliminary task have taught many lessons that I shall attribute into everything I do when it comes to my official coursework.