Evaluation Of School Magazine Front Cover and Contents Page

My front cover and contents page of the school maagazine use the conventions of real media products as i folllowed the codes and conventions to what i believe to be a high standard although i did miss out a few key devices such as the use of puffs and buzz words etc. The conventions such as containing a picture of a student, having both pieces very colourful and having the contents page full of images to attract the reader where followed closely so that i could produce a professional looking magazine.

To make my front cover image of the school magazines a used a new media software Adobe Photoshop. This software allowed me to edit my image, edit texts and add many effects to different images although i did not use many of these features due to time. Photoshop was very good at making my magazine cover because I was able to use some of these features in the hope that my school magazine would look professional. A weekness with Adobe Photoshop was that making a contents page on it would be very difficult as there is no columns on it. There are also many strengths such as how easy it is to use and the features it provides to make professional looking work. To make my contents page i used Quark XPress because it had columns on which would make it easier for me than photoshop. I found this programme more difficult as I had not previously used it but it was easy to learn the features on it. A disadvantage with Quark Xpress is that it does not allow you to resize images properly without changing the image dimensions. This problem was overcame by adjusting my images so that they could still fit in the area and look the same to how they did in the first place.
The strengths of my front cover are that they meet all the requiremants given in the brief, it fits in the codes and conventions and it looks professional, the weaknesses of it are it is quite plain and my coverlines are not very imaginitave or creative. Furthermore the strengths of my contents page are that it looked very prefessional with a range of different images and texts, the weaknesses are that i didn't do many articles which made the magazine as a whole look quite un-professional.