Analysis of university magazines

Today we looked at two front covers of University magazines. One called Newsman by Newman unviversity in Birmingham, the other is QUAD by Queen Mary University of London. We annotated the front covers, commenting on images, text, conent, layout, logo and how the traget audience is addressed.


The Newsman for me wasn't a great front cover for a University magazine. The images were very busy and were not clear. Also not everything on the front cover is relavent to University so may not appeal to the target audience. There is something on the front about video games linking to childhood obesity, this is not needed in this type of magazine let alone to be on the front cover. Although the magazine overall for me isn't as good as QUAD it still has some positive points. The pictures that are easily visible link with the text (the piggy bank and coping with university finance). Also you are told the exact date when the magazine was issued. Lastly there are lots of bright colours where the magazine name is, but overall the colour scheme is a bit much.

For me the QUAD magazine looked a lot more professional. Although the front cover is simple it is easy on the eye and it;s obvious what the magazine is about. The pictures are mostly all good for the magazine, the one i think is slightly irrelivant is the one of Queen Mary. But most of the pictures are to do with success and aspiration. The picture of the students after passing their course is great, they all look very happy and shows the University can bring you success. The text on the left hand side links with the three pictures of the Professors and what's going to be in the magazine. Overall i think QUAD is a good magazine cover as it appeals to the audience, looks professional and you know what the magazine is going to be about.

Preliminary Task Information

In today's lesson Mrs Cliffe outlined what we'r going to have to do in our preliminary task and also gave us a few hints and tips for our magazines.

We were asked to talk to eachother about: Traget audiences, images, language, content, how to attract readers and logos/colours. A lot of ideas were given and i think that my notes are really going to help when it comes to actually starting this task!

After making our own notes we watched a slide show about the secrets of magazine covers. There were lots of hints and tips that would help us when doing this and finally doing our music magazine. One tip i found useful was that green, white and black were not great colours to put on the front cover of a magazine also that in pictures it's more attractive if the person has their eyes wide open. Obviously I'm not going to write all the secrets down because that would be telling!

Lastly we got to look at some of the front covers from last year. We spoke about them as a class then rated them out of 10. Looking at covers that have been made by other students gave me some good ideas and also showed me things i should steer clear of like over crowding the front cover. It was good to see the reaction from the class and to hear what they said.

HOMEWORK.

This is the picture i started with. If you have read my previous blog, you'll be wondering where the trolleys are! Well sadly i couldn't use that picture as we couldn't get it onto the school system. So i decided to get a picture from google images.
So going from my base picture i've managed to turn it into my front cover. I've added text, pictures and i've also edited the picture slightly. I firstly chose the background picture because it's a beautiful picture of the English countryside. This ties in with the name of my magazine "Our Country" the name of the magazine denotes that it will be about England. But also the word country has a double meaning, the magazine it's not just about the country England it's about England's countryside. I used this particular text as i thought it would appeal to the audiencei've aimed the magazine at. It adds a bit of class to the front cover. For the main articles that are featured i used a more clear and bold text. I done this so that it was easy for the reader to see what will be featured in the magazine. I super imposed a picture of Bill Oddy onto the cover as he is someone who everyone associates with nature. He is a famous t.v presenter, nature lover and book writter. There is an interview in the magazine with him too so i thought he should have a main place on the front cover to attract readers. I also took this picture from google images, i then cut it out using the magnet lasso tool. I then used the "free transform" option follwed by cut and then i pasted Bill onto my front cover. Lastly i edited the original image slightly. I enhanced the colours of the water using the colour editing tools and i also made it look brighter by lowering the shadow and by putting the brightness up. I done this to make it more pleasing to the eye (not that it wasn't a lovely picture anyway).

All together i believe that the tools i and techniques i used on photoshop helped me to produce a good front cover for a nature magazine.

Yesterdays lesson 20/01/10

In yesterdays lesson we were let loose with the cameras! We were asked to go and take pictures of whatever we liked for the front cover of our nature magazine we'd be doing in our next lesson. I took a really good picture of the stream near our school, it had 3 trolleys dumped in it and i'd planned for the main feature of my magazine to be about how the environment is being ruined. I also took other pictures of the little patches of woods around the school that had been littered and ruined. Overall a good lesson!

Photoshop.

First time posting a blog and it's about photoshop, lovely. Well today we came into the library and learned about photoshop. I now know how to edit pictures in different layers. I know how to feather them, enhance them and do other wonderful things. Hopefully what i've learned today will help me when making my magazine.