Create a College

Magazine Front Cover and

Contents page.

AS Media Preliminary Task

Preliminary Task

Evaluation

1) In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms

and conventions of real media products?

2) What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of

real media products?~Front Cover~Masthead

Date line

Cover lines

Dominant Image (rule of thirds)

Footer

What are the differences between your front cover and that of a real media cover?

My magazine is also free, as it is aimed at students, whereas ‘Red’ has a barcode and price tag.

My main image is also of a student where as ‘Red’ have used a famous celebrity.

I have used a flash on my front cover to entice students into wanting the magazine.

My magazine cover has a plain background to make the cover lines stand out more, whereas the real media product has an interesting background.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

~Contents Page~Title

Features of magazine contents

Main image for feature contents

Sidebar

Sub-headings for contents

What are the differences between your contents page and that of a real media cover?

The actual contents and

features of the magazinesNME’s main

images are professional and show famous people, whereas my images aren't the best and show just students.

Colours on NME contents are kept to a few which is more subtle and looks more professional. The colours on mine are more random and college-like.

What have you learnt about the technologies used to construct this product?

I used Moodle for resources.

A digital camera was used to gain appropriate MCU’s for my cover image and contents page.

I used Adobe Photoshop to design my magazine cover and edit all images

InDesign was used to put my whole magazine spread together and to design my contents page

I used Blogger to upload all of my finished work for my preliminary task. Alongside using Blogger I also used Scribd and SlideShare

Using a digital camera, I could make sure my photo was an MCU and would fit my magazine cover. When I had taken my picture, I used Photoshop to edit it. Firstly, I cropped my image to enhance the vision of the rule of thirds, so the student was further into eye line. I then adjusted the levels of the contrast, brightness, background brightness and saturation to make the student appear healthier and the image to appear brighter.

I used the red-eye tool to eliminate

red eyes from the original image,

and used the spot-healing brush tool to eliminate any

blemishes.I also used the

spot-healing brush to get rid of slight under-eye bags.

before after

Using Photoshop, I added the cover lines, masthead, footer and date line to finish my magazine cover. I used drop shadows on my masthead and main cover lines to add emphasis, and used

the font colour to differentiate between the masthead and cover lines to make them stand out.

I used an outer glow on the

writing underneath the main cover line, to make sure it

stood out against the

background as it is quite dark.

On the flash, I used a bevel and emboss, colour and gradient

overlay, a pattern overlay and a

stroke to add the red border.

before after

Using InDesign to make my Contents page

I positioned my images around the page and between sections of the text so it broke up the page and didn’t look like massive blocks of writing, which would be boring to look at for the readers.

Using different colours for the different sections of text made it clearer and separated the sections, and also made the page brighter and more interesting. I also placed text in rows so it was easy and clear to read, with the main text in the middle of the page, for example the features, and less important text such as website addresses in the sidebar.

Writing was kept to a minimum so readers wouldn’t get dis-interested.

I used shapes to create a break between the text that separated the sidebar from the main contents.