Planning

Colours, fonts and pictures

For my first part of planning, I put the school logo on a variety of solid backgrounds and asked what looked best. The voting told me that the best was the bottom-centre closely followed by top centre and middle-right. I decided to combine these colours and make a cover with a gradient.

I disliked the yellow personally, so I did less work on one of those. However when I took votes, I found that most people liked the first or second cover so I decided to create two mock-ups to show how they might look.

After creating these two quick full A4 mock-ups and posting font to them, I again surveyed the same people. To my surprise the majority went for the yellow and cobalt blue theme as it was apparently the most unobtrusive, I therefore decided to use this as my cover background with the same gradient.

Cover Mock-up 1

This was my first mock-up and it contains a large amount of items that I did eventually use in my final piece. This included the photo which I think shows the happiness that would be evident within my school. I also kept the layout of the items going down the left and the font for the logo and yellow emblem. My title and font were inspired by ‘A Clockwork Orange’. One thing I did abandon at this stage was the multi-coloured titles and descriptions of the stories. I abandoned these as I did not feel they felt the maturity of the magazine.

Cover Mock-up 2

For my mock-up 2, I moved the logo and title to the left in order to give my photo a bit more of a fore-running on the page. However I feel that I then negated this by placing a banner across the photo. I did however like how I now used a uniform colour all the way through (Blue and Yellow) with the exception of my photo which is mostly black, red and white. This helps to draw their eyes to the picture first, would uses the majority of the cover.

Final Cover

For my final cover, I removed the banner and put the logo over very little of the photo’s head, this allowed me to give both the photo and the logo and title of the magazine to be as prominent as each other. Other than this, and the creation of the story at the bottom, I kept the magazine the same.

Contents Transition 1

I decided upon using a simplified version of the background from the cover, comprising a solitary yellow line with a small amount at the top. I also decided on using continuity by using the same title font and the same colour of fonts.

Contents Transition 2

For the next stage, I added a photo. I chose this photo because of the way it appears to be scrutinising the contents carefully, which is what I expect of any readers of the page. This helps to convey my ideas to the reader and essentially acts as an instruction.

Final Contents

For the final transition, I did little other than to add page numbers to the contents. I felt that while it added little. It made the cover seem rounded and the handwritten aspect of it gives off a little light-heartedness of the contents.