Evaluation of school magazine and contents page

I was asked to create a school magazine cover and contents page. In this task I was to take my own photographs on location of the school, and then to produce them into a magazine cover and contents page using Adobe photoshop and QuarkXPress. I found these programmes very useful and easy to use given the task that I had been set.


The usual codes and conventions of a school magazine are that; they usually contain a picture of a pupil on the front or a sports team, they are very easy to read as they are targeted at age groups from year 7 to year 13, they are also very colourful to attract the reader, the contents page contains many different pictures so that this will also attract the reader. In my magazine product I followed closely all of these codes and conventions so that my school magazine would look proffesional and realistic.


To make my front cover image of the school magazines a used a new media software Adobe Photoshop CS3. This software allows you to edit your image , crop it , edit texts, change image details and add many effects to different images. Photoshop was useful in making my magazine cover as I was able to use all of these tools to make my magazine cover look more professional and like a real school magazine. It also allowed my magazine to look more intersting for the effects that i could add onto my fonts and images.A weekness with Adobe Photoshop was that you cannot create columns which would mean that to make a contents page would be very difficult. However, it was very useful for my front cover because of how easy the software is to use and all the available tools which made it more interesting.


Another new media software that i used was QuarkXPress. I found this software more difficult as I had not previously used it. However, this programme was easy to learn and was much easier than photoshop for creating a contents page as it had built in columns which photoshop did not. A disadvantage with this software was because of the images that I had taken. QuarkXPress does not allow you to resize images properly without changing the image dimensions. I overcame this problem by adjusting my images so that they could still fit in the given area and look similar to how they did in the first place.


To conclude, in making this school magazine i have developed my skills and knowledge of using both of these new media software. I have also learnt more about the codes and conventions of a school magazine and can see how different they are to the likes of a music magazine. If i was to do this again, I would like to further develop my skills and knowledge on both of the software's to make my magazine look more advanced.