Evaluation of completed magazine

Front Cover

My magazine’s main colours are red, yellow and blue. These colours go very well together, I like the way that they are very complimentary of each other. However, the shade of yellow I have chosen I feel is a little too bright. I think it would be beneficial for me to make the colour a bit duller to make it easier of the eyes for the readers and make them more likely to pick up the magazine and buy it.

The main image on the front cover is very good. I think the positioning of the ‘band members’ is very good, but I think that the lighting makes its professionalism decrease. The light is much brighter from the right hand side, it is not even. In magazines the light is much better, and much clearer. If I were to do this magazine again, I would perhaps use an SLR camera which would leave me with more professional images. I chose an image with a white background as it wouldn’t make the front colourful and overwhelming for the readers. I think that this decision has worked very well as it has given me much more freedom in the range of accent colours I can use for covers lines and the mast head.

On the front cover, I decided to only use two fonts, one for the main cover line and another for the other cover lines. I decided to do this because it makes it easier to distinguish the difference between the importance of the articles. Both of the fonts are clear and easy to read. But a downfall could be that the fonts are both quite normal, generic fonts and don’t lend themselves to telling the readers what genre of magazine it is. I should have used fonts with jagged edges or cracks in it to show the more edgy nature of the genre of music.

Contents page

My contents page has various different colours for the fonts. I think this is good because it separates each section of the contents for the reader at a glance. In the letter from the editor, I like the difference in font and colour. I think the three colours I have chosen – blue, purple and red – go very well together and aren’t too bright as to take focus away from the band members at the bottom of the page.

The image in the background of the contents I think is very good and looks very professional. I think the way that I have used the empty space at the top of the picture as a place to put the text enhances this. The quote that is placed in the bottom half of the page, I think was a good addition to the page because it lets people get an insight into the article and the people that it’s about.

However, I think that if I were to take the background image again, I would have made sure I’d taken the photo at a slightly different angle. Where I took the picture from, you can see plants in the bottom left hand corner. Because there aren’t any plants on the other side, it doesn’t balance out and I think that it doesn’t look as professional.

Also, most magazines don’t feature the same band on the front cover and also on the contents, so if I were to redo this part of the magazine, I would retake the picture with a different group of people so it would fit the conventions of this genre.

Features Article

I believe that my features article is very good. I have used two different texts for the headline of my article. They contrast a lot; a soft font for the words ‘Secret’ and ‘Party’, and the word ‘Moustache’ has a cleaner cut font. I think this highlights the name of the band, making it stand out. By having the image of the moustache in the same colour as the word moustache in the headline, shows a sense of cohesion.  Also, the red used in the headline is the same red used on the tagline on the front cover; it makes the magazine seem like a complete unit.

The Polaroid on the right hand side of the first page overlaps onto the second page, I think that this shows

On the second page, there is a splash which shows how you can get in touch with the band. I think that this is a particularly good feature because the colour of the splash is red like the words in the headline on the other page. This balances the use of the red over the whole article.

On the right hand side of the page there is a strip of pictures of the band, it evens out the amount of words on the rest of the page. It makes the article look more like a professional article.