Preliminary task Front cover

For my photo shoot I took a series of photos featuring a year 7 student in her school uniform. I chose the photo showing the student struggling(to the right) student struggling with their homework. This shows the stress school causes students and makes a pupil want to read it because it relates to them.

When I first started planing my photo shoot, my initial thought was what to feature. I had a few ideas of taking photos of students doing work as it could lead to many articles. I made a decision to work my photos around stress because it symbolises and relates to student life. Next, I had to decide where to take my photos. I had decided that it should be either in a classroom or at home because they are the general places you do homework. I decided to do it at home because it shows that the stress doesn't stop at school; it continues at home. I asked my sister to be in my photo shoot as she is a year 7 student. A year 7 student is a good model as they are seen as innocent and shouldn't have such problems in their life. I took my photos with an Iphone camera because it was only a practice photo shoot and it didn't have to be an amazing resolution.


I edited the image on PhotoPlus so that there was a radial blur. This helped centre the image to the student and reflects a spinning, stressful emotion. This image is shown below before I added the conventions to go on top.

My magazine cover is shown below. I added my masthead The Saint because I felt it related to the catholic school theme. The font I used Looks old and traditional; much like the Catholic Church. I also put a puff on my magazine advertising a competition in the magazine which will entice the reader. I added cover lines and coloured the font so that they stand out.

As part of my preliminary task I have created a contents page that tells you the page numbers of articles in the magazine. I have put white boxes in positions where I would put a photo in a real magazine.

Planning my Photo Shoot - Preliminary task

For my preliminary task I need to design a school magazine. My magazines issue will be focusing on year 7 stress and how to overcome it. It is a good time for this article as new students to secondary schools have now been in school for five weeks and would now be facing problems from homework and intense lessons. My plan for the cover photo will feature a year 7 struggling with their homework at a desk. The student will be stressed and feel upset from the workload. I will use a mid shot from a side view.

Heat Magazine

The Heat magazine uses conventions on their front covers to attract the target market audience so that they buy the Heat magazine over any other magazine. Heat is a weekly magazine about gossip amongst celebrities. It has a circulation of half a million and has weekly issues. The Heat magazine specialises in maintaining the reputation in the public eye of celebrities who normally would have ‘fallen by the wayside’ or been replaced by other celebrities.

The celebrities highlighted in gossip magazines are usually female. This is because they can be presented as the 'female victim'. In the Heat magazine woman are often sexualised so that a male audience is attracted. Woman celebrities are also often represented in a negative light by leaking there personal life so that the issue attracts the curious target audience.

The primary audience are white, urban and female working class people who tend to be main streamers and have interests in celebrity gossip. The primary audience are generally around 18-35 year olds and the secondary audience is 35-55.

The colours used on the Heat front cover are saturated primary colours and have high key lighting. This is so that the magazine codes and conventions are anchored and the target audience is highlighted. The front cover of the Heat magazine has a high ratio of photos to text. This is a key design for a gossip magazine so that the user can identify it.

The masthead on the Heat magazine is always to the left and keeps the same design. The masthead is a lower case, red, serif font which uses a bold format with a shadow to form brand identity. The style of the font would stereotypically appeal to a female target audience.

On most issues of the Heat magazine, there is a sell line banner which advertises gossip articles inside the magazine. The sell line banner will use a photo and bold writing to attract the user to the article. In this example below you can see an article about the celebrity Katie Price. The mode of address is direct and upbeat as you can see from the font used and the exclamation mark. It seams like a boring article to the target audience but in brackets underneath it says “And gets off with a man half way through!” This tells the user what the article is really about and will interest the audience because it is gossip.

Gossip magazine covers are generally cluttered with bold text, images and colours to keep the attention and interest of the reader.  By making the stories and articles look exciting, the reader will think the gossip is important. This can make the reader feel like this is exclusive information and make them feel inclusive because they think know something not many others know about.

Preliminary task: Practice Magazine

For my preliminary task we must produce our own school magazine front cover. As practice for this task I made a practice school magazine cover so I could learn how to use the software. I software we are using is Serif PagePlus X6. Pageplus is a program that allows you to create posters, leaflets and magazines using design software.

The magazine I designed as a test is called 'The Saint'. This is because it is a catholic school so the magazine relates to its audience. I did not use my own photos as it was only a practice - I got my photos from my schools website.