Overall i am very pleased with the turn out of my music magazine. I was happy with the finished products; my front cover, contents page, and double page.
I am pleased i chose the name FUEL for my magazine, as i like the way it has an interesting meaning behind it, but it is also catchy and looks good on the page, thanks to the font i chose. The majority of fonts that i used were from http://www.dafont.com/. This site was very useful, as it gave the magazine a more realistic feel as the text was not written in a well known microsoft font. I tried to use various but similar fonts throughout the magazine that fitted in well with each other, and i think this worked, as the fonts used did not become boring and repetative.
I chose to use a similar colour scheme on each page ( cover, contents and double), as this would link the pages together making it more recognisable as a magazine. I opted for a more simple colour scheme of black, white, blue and a touch of purple on the double page. This worked well also as the pictures stood out nicely.
The magazine was aimed at an audience of 16 year olds, and upwards which i think was a good choice. By this age the readers will be attracted more towards classier looking magazines rather than busier bubble text covers. Also, the stories, bands, and style of writing would probably appeal more to this audience, than it would an audience of 13 year olds.
To produce my pages i worked on Photoshop and Publisher. I found Photoshop much easier to use than publisher, as the editing of text, images and the overall look of the pages was helped through the wide selsction of tools available on Photoshop. I used this for my front cover, and contents page as it helped give them a more realistic feel. I was therefore not as pleased with my double page because publisher could not give this, but continued to use common techniques of other magazine double pages to give it a believable touch.
I was happy with the the style of the images i used, but left the planning of the photshoot a little late and was forced to use myself in the image on the cover, therefore i had to have similar images on the double page which i was not completely pleased with as they were rushed. The colour scheme of the images fit in with the one of the magazine well. I felt that the front cover image stood out well, and was set out in a managable place. Therefore text and shapes were pretty easy to position around the image, still leaving the photo visable, and the main feature of the page. I also used some images from a gig i had been to, which i think fit in well, as it was images from an actual event. I edited each image i used very little. I slightly altered the brightness of each and used grayscale on the the double page images, which looked effective.
If i look back on my preliminary task i can see the huge progress made in the quality of each piece. My preliminary was very simple, and not very realistic. The fonts and colours used were very commonly known, and looked slightly tacky. Although, i was very happy with the image we used, as it was very effective, and eye catching. I learnt from this that i needed an eye catching image for my cover, but also to use colours, fonts and a magazine name that would appeal to the reader, aswell as looking attractive and realistic.
If i were to repeat this task of producing a front page, contetns page, and double page i would definatley spend more time on my double page, but also maybe use a more varied colour scheme, because if a whole magazine followed a restricted colour scheme it would become slightly boring. Also i would take more time to plan my photoshoot so i had a wide variety of images to use, not including myself. I am very pleased with the complete look of my magazine though, and think that it looks quite realistic.