Now that I’ve finished my preliminary project, it’s important to go back over the things I did right and wrong to ensure that my “proper” project is good.

One of the things that I feel came out well in my final cover was the text. This was one of the main issues with the original as it seemed to lack any and the little it did have seemed to miss the point. I instead used common techniques for magazines to make it more interesting and informative. For example, the teasers use questions like “success?” to make the reader want to find out whether or not they have been successful and buzzwords such as “exclusive” to make the reader think they are going to be seeing something unavailable anywhere else and therefore is unique. I included a plug, “high performing specialist science school”, to make the college, and therefore the magazine, look better and a slogan, “striving for excellence”, which implies the college is hard-working and wants the best, inadvertently saying that the magazine would be excellent.

The colours and the font are something I’ve mentioned before when going through the process and were something I spent a lot of time on. One of the things I was told to do after my presentation was to consider the effects of colours and their meanings more and so I did some research on the subject. I decided that the colours definitely needed to be positive to replicate the same effect for the magazine and college and the connotations had to do the same. Red, yellow and white all have meanings that can be positive for the magazine and college: energy and power, happiness and intellect and cleanliness and purity respectively. These are also the colours of the college logo and would make the magazine easily identifiable with the college and these are also colours that feature in the picture. For the font, I tried out many different designs. I already decided I wanted the teasers to be in a fairly standard font like “Times New Roman” to make it easy to read, but I wanted the slogan to look fancier to connote a higher class that goes with what it says so I went through plenty before deciding on “BrushScriptStd” which looked elegant but was also legible. The same process was done for the title which I wanted to do in a bold font to make it stand out, I eventually picked “TrajanPro Regular” as I like the way it was done in capitals but still distinguishes what would normally be a capital letter by making the letter bigger; this makes all the letters stand out, immediately catching the eye.

The title was one of the main issues to come out of the questionnaire as it wasn’t seen as very good but there wasn’t any other ideas given. I came up with several other options but none of them seemed anywhere near as appropriate. I eventually decided to keep it as “Bodmin College Magazine” because students receive a lot of magazines about studying and so on from the school and so by making it known that the magazine is from the college, it would make the students more likely to read them as it may have direct links or references to them, meaning it fulfils its function. This is something I won’t be able to do with the music magazine though and I’ll need to more creative when I’m making it.

The pictures are another thing that I felt could’ve been improved. The subjects and lighting and so forth look okay and fulfil their purpose, but the images look pixelated when they were resized so for the main project I’ll need to ensure that the camera I’m using is of better quality.