college magfront cover

This is my finished college Magazine cover and contents page, it took me around three hours to create. I decided to use my own photos and felt they fitted the brief because they illustrated the strap lines on the front cover, which enables people to see automatically what current issues are inside and relate to these. I downloaded fonts which I used on the front and contents page.

My final piece involves a medium long shot of me, hanging upside-down on some monkey bars in the park opposite the college where the readers of the magazine often hang out and would recognise and feel familiar with. In the picture I am wearing a grey hooded top and black jeans, along with big black glasses; I think the main picture of me connotes a quite fun and friendly look, and the pictures relating to the cover lines look quite humorous (to me at least) and I hope will draw people in to look closer, it breaks the conventions of how a college magazine should look and shows a rebellious side of students which may attract them to pick up and read it through. Down the right hand side of the cover there are cover lines along with pictures of me doing things related to the cover lines. I can see now it is printed that I have picked two different fonts, which i had meant to use the top one. At the bottom of the page there are subject lines which use the same font as the strap line in order to continue the same theme and a barcode along with a price and date. In the top left hand corner of the page is the masthead,this is where it is conventionally placed. It uses an old style looking which looks very retro and casual, possibly because it makes a flowing and flicky text. Below that is the strap line in a cliché American college style font which I feel is appropriate because it is for a college magazine and it looks kind of old school which matches the title.

My inside cover or contents page continues the old school theme by using a 1970’s wall paper pattern as a background which I sourced from a textures website. It has quite a bland colour scheme, with lots of browns and beige creams. When I look at it now I feel that this does not really suit the magazine very well and a cleaner white background would of worked more effectively, making it look more clean and modern. I also think I could have picked out the blue from the photos which may have tied it all together more effectively. I think that the contents page also lacks dominant compositional patterns, it seems that all the items seem very randomly placed; I feel this could make it harder for a reader to quickly scan over the content and pick up easily the subjects covered. I added some extra patterns in the background (such as tattoos and old photographs) in an attempt to make it look less boring, although I now think that this has just made it look cluttered, I would now choose to have a more formal layout to make it clearer but try still to use this format in a way which makes it appeal to young people using colour and fonts which would be appropriate. It has a smaller version of the masthead in the top left hand corner with ‘SEPTEMBER’ in a larger front below it, all the contents are on blocks of crinkled up brown paper and the fonts use a white stroke to make them stand out which I quite like the effect of in theory because of the subject being about littering. The inside cover has two pictures along with cover lines and page numbers; I tried to make these also look quite funny and casual although I realise use of humour can be hard to get right depending on the readers own views. I used other random decorations in the background so didn’t look too boring, although possibly these now make it look slightly ‘busy’.I felt that my front cover was more successful than my inside cover. I think the front cover is quite clear while the contents page looks crowded and I have learnt from this to keep a design more simple and use more complimentary colours when information has to be scanned quickly. Although I did try to take inspiration from an existing magazine (as you can see with ideas such as the contents and page numbers being laid out inside a photo box and having little sneak previews of photo from pages with page numbers on them.) I think that I drifted from the conventional magazine set out and it became overworked.


I think that students would feel that the magazine looks quite fun, current and welcoming. I hope it appears to come across as quite casual, possibly if the students are looking for a good read they may think that the magazine might not deliver, due to it not looking particularly serious, although I think most students would go for a magazine that looks like an easy read and the serious points raised in it will still get conveyed to the target audience.