preliminary tasks
Since I have joined my media studies course I have learned many things about magazines and how they are constructed. In my lessons I have learnt how to use Photoshop, drafting magazine front covers, I have also created a flickr account for all my images I will be taking during my media course and different camera shot types. For my coursework I have to create two magazines, one will be a draft and the other will be my final presentation. My draft magazine will be for the students of Orpington College and my final magazine will be for music. I have to use a medium close-up of a student on my front cover. I will be researching about different types of student and music magazines and looking at there different conventions to help me produce a magazine of my own.
In my lessons I also had to take pictures of random people at either the college or in Orpington to take specific shot types, for example medium close-up, close-up, establishing shot ect. With the pictures I shot I was able to put them on to Photoshop and edit them by cropping, changing the background and I was able to change the visual affect. My teacher wants me to have a medium close-up of a student for my student magazine cover; this is to shows that the magazine is for students. I will be looking at different music magazine covers to see what type of shots and pictures they have on the cover. We also had to analyse different examples of different magazine covers.
Marketing
Two people who worked on the Orpington college magazine came into lesson and gave me some ideas and notes on marketing and what can do to improve my coursework. Corporate images can refer to the house style and style guides; this has a lot to do with the font size and style, colouring, photography, use of graphic elements and use of grid designs. The magazine must be able to pass the readability test, they can do this by making sure the font size is big enough to read and nicely wide and spread apart so it can be understandable. Most magazines would have an average font size of over 12. Sandra Bauer and Sam Berwick have both worked on the student magazines and have asked the class for some feed back, they told us that they don’t actually make and design the magazine themselves but the write out a brief and send it off to a company that can design the magazine for them and use the brief a guidelines to stick to and make the costumer get what they wanted. They designer will also have to make sure that he has done his job correctly by making sure he can keep to the right conventions for a student magazine and make sure that the target audience will find it useful, understandable and enjoyable. The magazine should be easily associated with Orpington College and have a clear logo from the college on the magazine.
In my conclusion i think that my prelimanary task didn’t go as well as i thought. I was disapointed that i never finished my final front cover and contents page on time. I enjoyed the practicle work with the cameras and i also enjoyed indesign, photoshop and illustrator when i had to design my front cover and contents page.
