Dairy Entry Week 1: School Magazine

On the first day (31^st January) I was researching different types of school magazines to try and get a brief idea on how to lay out my magazine, and what the correlations were between each magazine.

1^st February – I then made a log in to use a program called blogger to keep all my work on for it to be easily accessible. Also on this day I started taking photos of students studying and also landscape shots of the school grounds; these shots were similar to ones in the researched magazines. These photos turned out well, but I was still learning how to use the aperture and change the shutter speed; this made some of my photos slightly blurry.

2^nd February – I started using Photoshop and was slowly creating my magazine around the codes & conventions of example school magazines. I used the opacity tool to create a slightly see through layer  of the school in the background; this made my font stand out and also made the title of the magazine (Students Monthly) stand out. I used the magnetic lasso tool a lot to cut out my front page picture and transfer it to being the top layer on the school. This image was a picture of a student studying at a desk.

3^rd February – I then moved on to choosing my font and colour, this made me use the text tool a lot more and allowed me to create a simple stand out title.

4^th February – I decided to start on my contents page and was thinking up a few ideas while looking at my draft.

I firstly decided to place an image of a school computer on the right hand third of the page, to do this I used the magnetic lasso and the rubber to cut out the image from its background. By placing the computer in the right hand third this gave me more space to complete the contents page with text to the left hand side. I also made a quick last minute decision to change the computer to black and white to make some other images stand out; to do this I used the saturation tool which gave the computer a greyish black effect.  

5^th February – On this day it was basically all based around putting in text and using the text tool for this. On the front cover I used a blue font to match with the schools colours and to make it stand out from the faded image of the school in the background.

I added in small sentences like e.g. Top Revision Tips For 2011.

To give the reader an insight to what will appear in the magazine, by doing research this appeared to be a very popular technique to entice the readers of other school magazines.

I also used the same colour and font for the contents pages text also, while not making it look too busy. I used the underline tool to make each page number and additional information for that page look together and simplistic so it didn’t merge with any of the other sentences. Finally after doing so I added some smaller images to the bottom third of the contents page to show what goes on in my school and what there is to get involved with. To do so I used the move tool and rotator on the corners of the pictures to make them stand out and give the contents page a bit more diversity.