College magazine Screen shots

Magazine ProductionScreen Shots – Front cover, Contents

For my front cover I decided to use a medium close up image of myself and holly as we are both students at City College. Also I thought the contrast of colour in our clothes was good to convey to the audience the variations in style. I achieved this effect by using curves and applying the black/white application to the image. I wanted a black and white image because the background I had planned was very colourful and busy, if I had kept the colour to the image my magazine cover would be too busy and look a mess.

For my background I wanted a dark colour to emphasize my image. I chose black and then I applied a grunge brush from ‘psbrushes.net’. This looked very effective and eye catching over the black background. After the brushes had been applied I used a stroke effect to add colour to the brushes and establish my magazines primary colours and style.

After completing the background I needed to add a masthead- the magazine name and cover lines to make my magazine appealing to the target audience. I choose the name ‘fo show’ which means for sure, taken from ‘dafont.com’ which tied in well with the City College slogan at the bottom. For the masthead I made sure that the style followed my image, and this is something which helped the whole style and contrast of the magazine

In my final editing stages, I chose to include cover lines as stickers and instead of a bar code I featured the price. I done this by using the shapes tool and to add an effect of a shadow I used a black shape underneath the white shape. Overall I think my cover conveys a style of grunge and student lifestyle.

For my contents page I wanted to continue the style of my front cover, using similar colours and shapes. I achieved this by using the bucket tool creating a black background, and then I used an artistic application called film grain to add texture and create a 3d look to the page. With the brush tool I decided on using star shapes conveying the ideas from my front cover. I think the sizes I used were effective in creating a 3d appearance to the page and the style also appeals to the target audience.

Following the sticker style from the front cover I used text from ‘dafont.com’ and used the stroke application around the box of text to define the intention of a school sticker look. My reasoning for this was to illustrate the genre of the magazine as it is intended for college students. I also included page numbers over a bullet point shape from my brushes. I purposely changed the angle of the stickers to be in keeping with the 3d look of the background.

The title of the contents page is the same style as the city college slogan at the bottom of my magazine from which I also got from ‘dafont.com’,although the contents title is inverted to the magazine title. This is because the background was too dark to apply the original title. For the contents title I used the plastic wrap application which emphasised the 3d appearance and then the neon glow style which added a purple tint inside the text. I also put a comic style shape in the bottom right of the page to entice the audience with free gift vouchers.

Finally my contents page needed an editor’s note, so from ‘dafont.com’ I used another sticker style title, then placed another shape around it to emphasise colour composition. After I added the text I used the stroke tool to put purple colour around the text, making it stand out.Including my picture, I didn’t want the page to look to busy so I made my portrait black and white using the saturation tools, then put a stoke effect around it. I also wanted to add personalisation to my magazine so I used another word text from ‘dafont.com’ which was my name as a different style, conveying variation.