Preliminary Task Evaluation

Self-Evaluation:

The main thing that I wanted to achieve when working on my preliminary task was to produce a decent front cover and contents page for my college magazine. The reason for me wanting to achieve this is that I wanted to aim for a professional-like production regarding both the front cover and contents page due to the fact that I wanted to give myself a challenge. I wanted to achieve this by using both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign in order to manipulate multiple images and text variations so that I could attempt to produce a good front cover and contents page.

There are both many good things and many bad things within the front cover and contents page I have produced. With regards to the front cover, the good things are that I stuck to a simple colour scheme and I included all of the vital/important things in which a front cover of a magazine should have. A few examples of these things are cover lines, a skyline, a flash puff, a barcode, a price, an image and a masthead. However the bad things with the front cover include me not including a date and not laying out the text & the image appropriately. On the other hand, referring to my contents page, the good things are that the contents page is very well laid out, it looks professional and I have included all of the necessary information in which a contents page needs. However the bad thing about my contents page is that I only included two images on the page when there should have been a minimum of three images.

Others think that between my front cover and my contents page, the contents page is the better production. They have said that this is because my contents page looks very professional and appealing to members of the target audience due to the colour (green) within the images I used connoting happiness, whilst my front cover is quite dull and poorly laid out hence making it look much less professional than my contents page.

My three main points for improvement are:

1.      To improve the overall layout of my front cover by putting things on the front cover in appropriate places so that the front cover will look more professional and more appealing to the audience.

2.      To add more content to the front cover by filling up unused spaces with more puff flashes and more cover lines. This will enhance the look of my front cover and will make it look less boring & more exciting.

3.      To add an extra image or two to my contents page. Although this would mean that I have to rearrange my contents page, it would result in more images correlating with the information that is already provided within the contents page.