Planning my College Magazine

In the planning of my College Magazine, I used different techniques to gather ideas and information about what would be required to create my magazine.

Firstly, a questionnaire was compiled by the class to see what people would like a college magazine to include and other issues that come into the publishing of the magazine. This was achieved by coming up with questions that would give a vast range of information on what articles would be included, the price, style, and frequency of publishing etc. The questionnaires were then filled out before being gathered for analysis. The results made very clear of what the most popular topics for articles were. I found, using the results, that music was a very popular theme throughout the answers, so I made sure that I would include an article on music.

Another technique used, was to analyse real magazine covers. To do this I chose an existing cover and used Flickr to analyse it in detail. Flickr allowed me to pick out certain areas of the cover and write my comments about the allocated area. This helped me understand the layout of magazine covers and to understand that it is important to keep the theme of the magazine consistent. This analysis can be found in an earlier post.

To actually plan my magazine I used my knowledge gained from earlier techniques to sketch out a rough idea for the front cover, deciding on a title, what articles I would include and I also roughly sketched out what I wanted as my picture so I knew what I was looking for when it came to taking it. I had to sketch in all the necessary components, for example, date, price, and barcode, as well as the more obvious title, pick up lines and pictures. All this gave me something to work with when I came to creating it on Photoshop, where further changes could be made.