Preliminary task evaluation

Finally my preliminary task has been completed, it has taken various numbers of sleepless night, blood, sweat and tears in order to complete this and I can honestly say I have never been so proud to look at a school magazine in my life.  I take my hat off to the writers of my old school newsletters and it is with great waves of guilt that I say I am sorry for throwing away all of your hard work without at least honouring  it with a skim read.  I never realised it was quite this difficult , one of my main difficulties i encountered while taking part in this task was trying to make the content both interesting for parents and pupils. Part of me was looking back at when i was in school and trying to imagine what I and my parents would both find interesting and school related...I would come back with absolutely nothing! So instead of making the individual articles interesting for both adults and children I decided to try and make a balance of articles, some that parents would be more interested in and some that the pupils would be more interested in. So within the contents page I have a variety of different articles that would appeal to one or the other of age ranges. The front page has a more formal article from the headmaster more aimed at the parents and then there is a sports article praising a pair of students which I feel is more aimed at pupils due to the inclusion of fellow students within the article. I also had slight difficulty when trying to make it more creative or unique through the use of Microsoft publisher, I feel the program is very bland and has limited tools for creative use.  It is helpful for structuring etc as it offers a wide variety of text boxes and guidelines for me to position wherever I feel necessary however I think for my main task i will make an attempt to use another program such as ‘Plasq’s Comic Life’ in an attempt to make it more eccentric and colourful.  Something that I did find easy during the task was deciding on the layout of the both the pages, at first I believed it would be difficult to decide how i want the front and contents pages to be laid out however after looking at other school’s magazines i was able to make a decision on how exactly I wanted the pages to be laid out, and I stuck to that mental layout throughout.

I feel that my research into other school magazines was very limited however. In hindsight I don’t think I would have had to spend vast amounts of time trying to decide on appropriate articles for both audiences if i had spent a little bit more time on how other successful school magazines were able to achieve this. Instead I looked closely at the layout and only the layouts.  I feel that next time I will spend a lot more time and energy on the analysis of appropriate magazines and their techniques and content to ensure that I can take and combine ideas to get the most out of my magazine.

I used various tactics when making my school magazine in an effort to attract both audiences of pupils and adults. For starters i ensured that the logo was clear and bold on my front cover so that just a quick glance at it on the family coffee table or poking out of the pupils bag will allow the audience to realise that it is a letter from school and may peak curiosity. I have then ensured that the headlines are bold and in the case of the boxing headline i have made sure that it is colourful to make it stand out and jump from the pages at the audience.  I also did not want to have a ridiculously long article on the front page as i feel that may deter people from attempting to read it if there is just a vast amount of words plastered onto the front page, so instead of having the full headmasters article I have placed a note at the end of it saying continued further on so that if the audience wishes to continue reading they will be more inclined to open the magazine to read more.

As mentioned previously i feel i would like to use a different program when performing the main task for the sole reason that i felt Microsoft Publisher really lacked in creative options.  It appears to be very set in stone that it is for business use, it does have a lot of helpful utilities such as ideas and help when setting a layout however I do not think that there is an awful lot of experimental work you can do with the program. next time around i will definitely be using Plasq’s comic life for the majority of the work, i had a quick play around with the functions towards the end of the task and i feel it holds alot of potential for inputting my own creativity into the work. It offers a vast array of eccentric lettering and colours for my text and also offers a number photo editing options and effects to get the most out of my images.

If I have learnt anything from this task it’s that I should spend a lot more time in researching similar magazines in order to further increase the amounts of ideas that I have to play with. By placing more time into research i feel it will save me a lot more time in trying to come up with imaginative ideas on my own.