Evaluation

Front cover:
This was the first page that I designed of my magazine, I am pleased with how it turned out despite that fact I would change some things. I did start to change my original sketch a little, as I realised that what I wanted to do wouldn’t fully work, however I did stay very close to the original design, I just added some more detail. I chose the title of my magazine ‘the Haydon voice’ because I wanted it to seem like it was a magazine for the whole school and that it spoke on behalf of Haydon and its community. The picture of a male student in sixth form was always planned to sit in the left hand corner of the cover so I had space around the edge for writing. When I took this picture I took it against a wall that was slightly off-white so I removed the background on photoshop so it would blend in with the rest of my cover and not clash with white and off-white. Originally the writing around the edge was in black and white boxes and it looked very boring, so I used the colours of the five Haydon values and made each of the boxes a different values colour. This was also because I included the Haydon values on the front. In addition I was not happy with how little colour the front cover had on it as it did not look inviting or colourful so I added these to give it more colour. However, I would still add more of a background colour as it is quite simple and boring I was just very stuck on what to add in the background so I kept it white. Moreover, in the top right hand corner I included a slightly transparent image of the school logo to represent the school. When looking through past students magazines one of them made a school twitter account, so I took inspiration and did the same as it is a very good way for the students to connect with the school/magazine as social media is so widely used.

If I could improve the front cover I would defiantly add a background image of some sort to make it more interesting. I would also take the photo of my students portrait instead of landscape as when I took the photo I took his picture landscape and it was not until I was adding the image that I realised I was meant to take a portrait picture, this resulted in my messing around with the picture slightly to change the shape of it.

Contents page:

I worked on this after the front cover and ended up changing it slightly as I came across the same problem that it was not colourful enough. The actual contents of the magazine is numbered depending on what page the information is on to make it easier for the students to find the information. I based my magazine off the new year/new students at Haydon so I included information for new students on what it is like and a general introduction to Haydon and its history. Moreover, I included information about the new sports hall and comments that the students have made about school facilities etc. The reason I included comments from the students was to make the people of Haydon feel more involved in the magazine and also to intrigue them so they are more likely to get the magazine to see what people had to say. The pictures on the bottom of the page were ones I took of the school. The photos I took were of the outside of the sixthform block, one of the building in the courtyard and the construction work of the new sports hall as I mention it on both contents page and front cover. Realising that my contents page was not colourful enough, I included a faded picture of the Haydon values in the background of the image to brighten it up.

If I were to improve my contents page I would have taken more pictures to include, especially a portrait picture that I would have in the background. When using the software I struggled to really make use of the interesting tools both indesign and photoshop offer, so I would play around with the tools and add more technique and make it more interesting rather than some text and images. However, at the time I was new to the software so I did not take full advantage of the tools because I didn’t know how to use it.