Evaluation of my College Magazine pages

My final product has both good and bad points. I really like the colour scheme that I have used on my front page and contents page. I think the black and white main image stands out from the red background and makes the magazine more appealing. I originally only used red, black and white but after some suggestions being made, I decided to add some yellow to the page as well. I decided to do this because it makes the front cover so much more friendly. If there were only three colours on the page it could seem a little boring and not many people would want to pick it up to read. I only used three different fonts on my front cover because I didn't want my page to look too busy but at the same time I didn't want to just use one because it would look too plain. The main masthead has a font which I found off a website and the rest of the magazine does not have this same font. I used a mixture of serif and san serif fonts to create a contrast between different words.

The main image I used on my front cover I don't think looks very good on the page. I think I should have taken a photo with more of a background to make it seem more friendly and to appeal to college students. I think that making the image black and white was a good idea and I think it definately works. The picture is not very good quality though and I would have to change that next time I complete a task like this. I also think maybe my image looks a bit too bright and 'in your face.' It might have looked better if I had made it darker rather than lighter.

The language used on both my front cover and contents page I believe is good for a student. I haven't written anything in a patronising way but at the same time I haven't written long complicated sentences because I know that teenagers would not want to pick up a magazine that looked like that. The choice of name for my magazine is fairly obvious. Students have lockers and would put a magazine in their locker so I thought 'Locker' would be a good name for a student magazine. The masthead itself is in a san-serif font that looks 'cool' and friendly rather than boring. I chose to make it black so that it stood out but then I decided to add some colour round the edges to make it seem less harsh and more appealing to the reader.

The layout of my magazine could be better but I don't think it is that bad. I think I should have squeezed the words together a bit more to try and fit more onto the front page because it does seem to look like there should be more on the page. Maybe next time I could move the writing around a lot more so that it looks more interesting.

Getting to learn photoshop a bit more was great for me because I went from being a complete beginner to knowing how to do a fair few things on there. I did (and still would) have to ask for help to do a lot of things, however I am much clearer than I originally was on photoshop. I don't think my photography skills are very good at all and next time I take a picture for my work I think I should plan it more and keep taking pictures until I find one that I think is perfect, rather than settling for the first one I take. I now understand layers on photoshop a lot more. When I first started working on photoshop I was constantly on the wrong layer and it really confused me how the layers work. I'm still not always 100% sure about layers but I now have more understanding than I did before.