Planning my College Magazine

For my front cover I analysed different magazine covers to look at the kind of things they had on the front, (mainly 'Soup') this helped me to understand the different kinds of styles you use on a front cover, where to place the writing/photographs etc. I also created a questionnaire where I asked five people the questions it contained to gather information on what I should have in my magazine, this helped me choose what to put on the front cover by finding out what people like. My results were combined with the class results to find the most popular categories in each question. Our questions were ones like:
What genre of music do you like the most?
and
What are your hobbies?
Plus a lot more to help us understand our audience.
When planning my cover, I started with a name for it. I had a list of possible titles, i.e.: Scream, Showdown etc. but my favourite was Voice, (meaning to be the students voice) so this was the name I chose to give my magazine. I then decided on the photographs I wanted to have on the front, and went out with a group to take some. I wanted pictures of other students on the Recreation Ground, and I also wanted photographs of my friends to be part of the main feature. I chose my friends because they went to an Enter Shikari gig so I decided to make my main feature about that gig. I wanted the photos of them together to go with a cover line that related them to the band. I took these photographs in my spare time. For colours I knew I wanted to use these ones: purple, blue, black, white, possibly green. I was really pleased when I finished my cover, I was pleased with my PhotoShop work and with the way it all came together in the end.
We also looked at different examples of contents pages to see how they too are laid out, what kind of things they choose to include in the contents, how the main feature of the magazine is presented and other things such as colour schemes. I chose a magazine that had a contents page layout I liked (Heat), and I used this as a template to copy onto PhotoShop. This improved my PhotoShop skills as I was learning how to copy a professional magazine. It was difficult to copy at first, but the more of the contents page I re-created, the easier it became. Once I had successfully copied the contents page, I put some of my own information on it. For photographs I had grey boxes with just a sentence or two on what the photo would be. I also made a contents list on what I would include in the magazine, just for a rough idea on what it would all look like when it was finished.
I was pleased with the result of my contents page, but I didn't like the colours I copied as they completely do not match the colour style of my front cover.