Planning for Preliminary Task

A while ago I began planning my preliminary task, which is to design and produce the front cover and a mock-up contents page of a new school magazine. I set myself the following list of planning tasks:

1. Decide on a title
2. Take photos.
3. Do rough layout of of cover
4. Get information about school events (which can be referenced on my cover)
5. Choose font/s

Title

The first thing on my list was to decide upon a title appropriate for use on my magazine's cover. This may seem like a slightly insignificant task, but the title actually plays a large part in determining the layout and aesthetic structure of the cover. It is also essential that the font used in the magazine is complementary of the title; for example, a school magazine entitled "Happy Wilmo" would look strange if the font used was dark and Gothic.
My first step in coming up with a effective title was to make a list of possibilities., which is as follows:

• WGSB Mag
• Weekly Wilmington
• Wilmington Weekly
• Weekly Wilmo
• Wilmington Mag4Skool
• Wilmag
• Wilmington's Termly Times
• Wacky Wilmington
• Wilmington Knights
• WGSBlast
• Wilmington Grammar Snapshot
• Wilmington Wheeze
• Wilmington Wagger
• Wilmington Wailer
• Wilmington Woof

I surveyed people about which title they thought was best; specifically I surveyed students at my school, as they are the target audience. I personally asked 43 students which title they thought would be most appropriate for the school magazine, and then collected the results to find which were most popular. I found that the two most popular titles were WGSBlast and Weekly Wilmo; I therefore decided to use WGSBlast because I personally prefer it and it is also more unique than Weekly Wilmo, as other people in the class had magazine names that were fairly similar to it.

Photos

I decided the next thing I should do was to take photos that could be included on my cover, as I couldn't yet choose my fonts since I would need something that complemented my picture. I went around school taking pictures of different students in different places /situations, such as the science labs, the computer rooms, the library, the school entrance and the school grounds. I took a wide range of photos, amounting to 103 in total, and doing so allowed me to have more photos than I needed which allowed me to have more of a choice. It also meant that I could have photos to include on the contents page. I have uploaded some of the pictures I took to give a better idea about the effort I put in, and also so that the people who I didn't include on my cover still feel their posing was worthwhile. I asked people, including my teacher, for advice regarding which picture they thought would be most appropriate  for the cover of a school magazine. It was widely agreed that the photo I had taken of Glenn in the library (shown above) was the best one, and I decided to use it.
The next thing I had to do was edit the photo in Adobe Photoshop. The first thing I did was remove Glenn's spots with the spot removing tool, as I believed that people would not like a magazine cover with someone spotty on it. I then decided to make the background of the picture black and white, while keeping Glenn and the book he's holding in colour. To apply this effect I desaturated the whole photo and then used the history brush to re-colour Glenn and the book.

Rough Layout of Cover

The next thing I had to do was a rough layout of my cover, so that I had an idea of what to include and where to include it. this was useful as it let me mess around with things to see what looked best, and as it was only a rough plan it didn't matter if things went wrong. The layout I did is to the right and it is interesting to compare it to how my cover actually ended up.

Information on School events

I had already decided to make the main headline on the cover be about the school library, since I was using the photo of glenn in the library and the story had to be relevant. However, I also had to research school events so I could get some ideas on possible headlines. I did this by looking over past school newsletters and by asking teachers about any events that are coming up. In all honesty this didn't end up being very useful and I mostly made up the headlines that I used.

Choosing Fonts

This took a bit of time, as I went through each of the fonts installed on Photoshop to see which was most suitable. For the magazine title and main headline I used the font Kitty Katt and for the lesser writing I usually used variations of Lucinda Sans. I made the font colour for the title blue as it is in keeping with the school badge, which I also wanted to include. For the main headline I used yellow as it stands out from the largely desaturated background.