Analysis of preliminary work

For my Preliminary work I had to create a front page and a contents page for a school magazine. It is intended to show how my skills in photo shop will develop over time when it comes to creating my own music magazine. To create my school magazine I needed initial ideas to help me plan and design what the school magazine would look like, I began brainstorming ideas for the title and storylines, by doing this it saved a lot of time when it came to create the school magazine as I could refer to my designs. I also created draft title pages and contents pages showing a rough idea were I was going to place pieces of text and pictures. I then took numerous pictures around the school that worked with my chosen storylines. I used a medium close up of the model for the front cover which was required and took photos of other students in different locations around school for numerous stories I had created and placed them on the contents page and front cover.

Front cover for preliminary task


I took a picture of a student on a blank wall and using the lasso tool i cut around the image. I had not had much practice with this tool on photoshop and therefore the picture was not seperated from the background very neatly. The photo has a jaggered edge and looks unprofessional by doing this task it has taught me how to use the lasso tool to get a more desired professional finish to an image and this will be shown in my music magazine. Although i have used a pug like many typical magazines, many of them do not use them for the price of the magazine, I have learnt this through the research i have taken out for my music magazine. Also the main headline gives the indication of the title of the magazine and could have been positioned better. Overall this task has helped me undersetand photo shop elements and my new skills will be put to use when creating my music magazine.

Contents page for preliminary

I used the same colour font on the contents as the front cover of the school magazine to keep a house style throughout. Alhtough the light lilac and purple don't work very well together and this shows me not to use similar font colours on similar coloured backgrounds when it comes to creatin my music magazine. After looking at typical magazines most of them do not have the page number written in words across the images but in digits, i will use this idea when creating my music magazine to make it look professional as well as typical of all magazines. I learnt how to crop and resize photos in this task which will also be helpful when using photoshop again.