An evaluation of my college magazine

Front cover

I have been asked to produce a college magazine front cover and contents page. To help me do this I have taken many different photographs of people around the college building. Also, the images that I found were the best I used on my front cover and contents page.

My front cover presents a medium close-up shot of a female student with her earphones in. I wanted to use this image because she represents the typical appearance of teenagers and the fact this is a medium close-up of one person means less attention on the surroundings and more focus on the centre character. What I like about this image is her costume; she is wearing a black jacket which means text can easily stand out in contrast with the darkness.

I also like the big bold masthead written in capitals which clearly lets people know that this is not an ordinary magazine you buy in the shop but it’s one for the students in the college. I used purple as my main font colour because it matches really well with the main image and it works with red and blue which are used within the magazine to suit the male and female audience. Another great feature on the front cover is the selling line which is a short, sharp description of the title’s marketing point. In red it says ‘top news!’ which tells the audience that the magazine does not include only one subject but nearly everything about college.

There are a number of things that wasn’t so well for example, the main coverline ‘what is the real cost of rising tuition fees?’ was not large enough to catch the audience’s attention and the position of the text made it look unimportant. It could have been located across at the centre of the page in a larger size seeing as there’s little text at the bottom.

Contents page

The contents page includes three different images which will capture the audience’s interest even more. One of the images is landscape shot from over the shoulder to show what the student is drawing in design and technology. I also like the image of the person wearing these big headphones while listening to music looking rather trendy and urban which is why you’ll find text at the bottom of the contents page about winning Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. This also relates to music as well as fashion.

What makes the contents page attractive is the white background that makes the bright text stand out especially the large title. Also the layout of the different topics and page numbers makes it easy to read as it’s listed altogether at the bottom right hand side of the page. I like the fact that purple is used as my main colour font together with the title and sub-headings using less colours than the front cover.

My contents page could be improved by labelling the different images with page numbers that relate to a topic in the magazine, so that the reader can go to the specific page without any trouble of trying to find it.