Preliminary Task: Photoshop (College Magazine)

The plan I created for my preliminary college magazine:

The final cover I created for my preliminary college magazine:

The layout of the cover is much the same as my flat plan idea, although I decided to leave out boxes that would be placed behind the text that I had planned, because I thought this would make the cover look too cluttered and would take away from the simplistic example I was going for. I decided to use a very simple and readable font that can be associated to American football teams, so as to appeal to the target audience of college students, and, also due to the genre of the magazine, I placed an image of a student central to the piece. I chose the colour scheme - white and black - so as to keep in tune with what was most common, as I thought this would be my safest bet to begin with. Although, my model was standing in front of a grey/dark white background when I took this photo, and so I decided to keep this as an extra colour tone, as I thought it pulled away from the common look slightly, but still looked quite professional. Due to what the model is wearing, however, I don't think I should have kept the background the colour that it is, as her jumper almost camouflages itself into the background, and so this is something I can learn from and will have to be aware of in the future.

The final contents page I created for my preliminary college magazine:

The layout of the contents page is a lot different to what my first ideas were, as you can see from my flatplan. This was mainly due to the fact that I planned my preliminary to contain a plain background with a lot of text covering it, but I felt like that wouldn't be appealing enough to the viewer from their first glance at the magazine. Thanks to my new contents layout, the page matches the theme of the cover page a lot more, keeping a neat consistency that any good magazine should have. Next time, I would make the text smaller however, as it is slightly too large in sections, and covers part of the model that I didn't want it to do so. I kept the colour scheme the same from the cover page, which I think works well, but some of the text in the top right hand corner of the magazine is barely visible, and so I would have to think more clearly about this next time.