Contents Page

This is the contents page for my school magazine. This is when I first started using photoshop and I was useless at it. I couldn't work out how to work it and I couldn't get rid of the column lines in the middle of the page. This is kind of how I wanted my contents page to look but I didn't want a big white block in the middle, it looks really messy and I'm not happy with the out come. 

Step 1 - ideas

We got given a little project of quickly designing a front cover of a school magazine and deciding how many pages it would have. We looked at several different school magazines to get an idea of how many pages they should have and what they each focused on most.

I worked with Amy Sladden and we decided to keep it simple and actually called in Parkwood as we thought that it was straight to the point. Although we did understand after talking about ours to the class that we could have been more imaginative with the name as calling it after the college may put students off reading it, and we decided that we wanted this magazine to be mainly for students, although we did aim it to be for parents as well.
We came up with the slogan 'We're all in this together' to show that as a college we are very close. It is only a little place and after discussing it Amy and I decided that everyone does know everyone and we feel like the Sixth form is like a little family and we felt that this slogan fitted well with that.

We decided that it would have 6 pages and that it would focus on all different aspects of the college, showing all the different types of talent that filter the college. An example being that one week it may be a music show that has been on, and the next week it may be the football team. We felt that that way everyone would be interested in reading it.

School Magazine and Evaluation

This is my final cover of my school magazine.
It is the first thing that I ever made on photoshop and it took me a long time to get to grips with how everything works. I decided to call it 'The Class' due to it being a school magazine, I thought that readers would understand what it was about just by the name. I chose the font for the magazine as I thought that it was like an American high school football club font - linking to the school theme of the magazine.
This is one of the fonts that I experimented with before the final decision.

I wanted my school mag to be a drama based issue and that's why I chose the picture that I did, this is a picture from a musical that our sixth form and school joined together to present called 'The Groovy Magic Love Show', it was set in the sixties and that's why the people in the picture are dressed like this. I chose this long shot picture that has all their bodies in because I thought that it showed the costumes well, which is what I wanted, yet they are all still looking at the camera, drawing people to look at the magazine.
As the play was set in the sixties I chose to do all the font colours in bright colours linking to the era. also the font in which 'Groovy Magic Love Show' is written in I think links to the sixties period.
This is another font that I experimented with, I really liked it and thought that it was brilliant from the theme that I was trying to get across but unfortunately I couldn't work out how to paste it into photoshop without ruining the size and pixels of it, so I settled for the one that I now have which I think works just as well.

The 'sell lines' on my magazine are things that I think pupils would want to read about in a school mag, the prom, trips and I have also written about a review on the show. I chose to write it in informal language as I felt that pupils would not want to read it if it was formal.
If I could do this cover again it would be a lot better as I am more confident with photoshop now, see music magazine, and I feel that I would be more adventurous with how I laid it out. I do this that my school mag is eye catching and that people would want to read it.

Planet Rock

One of the first projects that we had to do was to create a project from the title - Planet Rock. We were told to be creative, innovative and original with our ideas. It could be anything that we like to do with music, so a band, a website for a band, a record label, a festival, a radio station and so on.

I worked with Amy Sladden for this project and we both decided that we wanted to take pictures of a 'band' and make there website. Unfortunately the name 'Planet Rock' didn't fit in the the image we had created for our band so we chose to make 'Planet Rock' the record label.

We took a couple of lessons to decide want sort of genre we wanted the band to be, the music they would play and how the website would be set out. We liked the 'indie' vibe as it contrasted well with 'Planet Rock' as it wouldn't be heavy mental but the opposite, but in some ways we felt that it reflected and worked well with the calm image of the website that we ended up with.

We chose our models, Ailsa Scott and Mell Sexton, dressed them up how we wanted them to look and went to Alexander Park to take, well over 150, photos. We then chose which ones we liked and edited them slightly as we liked the way they came out in a non professional way, feeling that it linked with the overall image we were looking for. Originally we were just going to chose who had the better pictures to fit the idea and just use them but after looking through them all we thought that they were too good not to use and made them into a band together. Forming 'Induction', the name we gave the band.

 I then looked at several different band websites that fitted into the category that we wanted 'Induction' to slot in too, indie bands like Razorlight, The Kooks, Marina and the Diamonds, Kate Nash and Florence and the Machine. I spend some time looking at how their websites were laid out and what worked in making people   become fans and listen to their music. On most websites where the usual links to different pages like the bands Facebook and Twitter pages, so I made sure I put them on ours. I also put on Island Records, I did this so it was like Planet Rock was owned by Island Records, showing how  big the music industry is, they always have labels linked to labels.

On all band websites there was information about upcoming albums and singles so that fans are kept up to date with what the band is doing. I put these things on the 'front page' of Inductions website a long with lots of pictures, laid out in a interesting manner that reflected the overall image of the band. I then drew pictures and made the lay out eye catching and imaginative so that fans would find it interesting to look at. I also did the usual things you find on the front page of a band website, links to videos, photos, tour dates, shop, news and more.

It took Amy and I some time to get this project to look exactly how we wanted it to look but I feel that it looks very effective and I am happy with it overall. I think if we had more time we would have looked more into making Planet Rock a bigger part of the website.