My Completed Student Magazine

Here is my final cover design for my student magazine. I decided to go for the sleek and co-ordinated design look, so it visually appealed to the younger audience by not looking to busy and chaotic.
I used 4 tag/cover lines all plugging the articles in the magazine, so readers can pick it up on-the-go and get straight to the parts they want, something I think is important when travelling around.
I'm really pleased with my proportions and layout choices.

• My colour scheme of red, white and black matches my cover stars outfit. The use of 3 colours makes it bold and stands out to the human eye.
• I've used the Rule of Thirds for the cover lines. Keeping them in columns to look neat.
• My model is engaging with the audience by panning her eyes down the camera lens (as if looking directly at us).
• The white background really projects my model and her backpack, making the readers aware of the target audience and the type of person who would pick up and read this magazine.
• The main cover line 'THE DEBUT ISSUE FEATURING BEE ROGERS' gives it that star appeal that young readers want from magazines today, it gives it a USP (unique selling point) that grabs the audience's attention. It makes it sound fresh and exciting and not so focused on the educational stresses they may already have; this makes readers want to read INSIDE magazine as it separates them from all their work load and allows escapism.
• It is also the most dominant cover line as it is separated from the other three by it's isolation. There's nothing clumped near it so it is obvious that this one should be read first. It has the most changes to the font size, colour and itallics etc.

When working I had extra time on my hands so I decided to make my magazine look even more professional by adding in an Editor's Note. This was the most fun to do as I could move away from the generic look that most magazine's have and create my own layout and play around with how I presented it. I would say I kept it fairly to the expectations of and Editor's Note, as I used images, the same fonts and colour scheme to stay with the continuity of my magazine and not look confusing to the readers. I did this by using the red font colour that I associated the link to Bee with for the small passage under her picture, to keep the connection there with her and the colour red. It makes her stand out as important and the red is loud and in your face against the black so it really grabs your eye. I liked how I used the screenshots of my twitter (http://twitter.com/B_ARose) and tumblr (http://loveisfreehappinessisexpensive.tumblr.com/) page to keep in with the QR codes that I made myself and the ideology of teenagers/young adults always being on-the-go and the digital age of social networking. The images gave it a stylish edge and I think to overall ideas and layout worked perfectly.
I used a slightly different font to what I had been using for all the main text, but keeping with the theme of my magazine by using the font I used for my QR codes annotation.
The sans serif font made it easier to read, which is why I chose it, as I knew that this would be harder to read having a block of text in the serif font I was using. However I do think it worked well for the contents page (below).

Here is my finished contents page. I completed it by using many boxes.
This is my favourite page out off all of them as I think it looks most professional, as it really looks like the piece of inspiration I stemmed it from. The use of the red white and black goes with my chosen photographs and how all the boxes almost collage together looks really cool.
I divided my magazine into sections and when typing the page numbers I thought about how long I would want each feature to be, rather than guessing the numbers, I strategically worked out a system of pages. The way the overlapping looks I think is what made this page successful as the layout is really what grabs you here. The choice of articles and features I think works well for a student magazine and the QR code links to them always being on their phones. The choice of the photograph I took of the two girls was made really suddenly on the spot. I needed a third picture and I didn't want to keep using Bee and I already had one of my boyfriend, and I thought have a random object might look odd but all my friends where to camera shy to pose for me. So looking through my laptop library of previous photos I had taken, this one I took on a college school trip and I thought the black leather jacket and the red hair worked well for my colour scheme and both girls have that fresh modern look and capture how my target audience look today. The posing was really chilled and I had two others to chose from (see below) but when trying to fit them in there were some problems with pixilation and getting the photo sizing to fit the page. I thought this pose was the most 'rock 'n' roll' it had the fun element I was after and this photo I had taken for fun. Because they both have red hair I could easily disguise them as sisters and they had a united look that would make them easy stars to feature. Overall they fitted exactly what I wanted.


These were my other two options however they didn't have the same look as the first photograph so I decided not to use them.

The top one, Emma (on the left) was looking away and although Lara (on the right) had the look, I needed both of them to look in synch with eachother. The bottom one they both look far too posed and Emma's parting doesn't match Lara's which visually looks slightly off. I do however still like the essence of these photographs.