Preliminary Exercise - Evaluation

After completing my School Magazine front cover and contents page, there are many things that I have learnt and in this post I will evaluate the work that I have done in the past week.


My media product conforms and challenges the codes and conventions of real media products in a number of ways. Firstly my front cover contains all of the elements of a media magazine should contain, for example the Bar Code, issue and price and date are all present in the bottom right. However I think that the layout of the front cover, and manipulating these elements could have been improved. The masthead, even though it still stands out, was made using the font tool, and should have been much more unique, as it would have stood more. The contents page deviates from the codes and conventions in a few ways. For example the font is 12pt, not 11, and the page numbers do not stand out. The images have been laid out in a way which is unusual for a contents page, and could be improved. The 3 columns are present (used traditionally in contents pages) and there is an effective number of features and regulars. The images do not have any accompanying captions to link the images to the text. However the main image is of an appropriate size for the main article.

In creating this media product I used two programmes, one to create the front cover and the other for the contents page. As I was already familiar with Photoshop, the new technology that I have used was QuarkXPress. This was used to lay out the contents page using the columns and various box tools. For the next contents page I will try and use Photoshop and Quark together, transferring media across to make the technology more efficient.

I think that currently my strength is with my experience with Photoshop and my ability to manipulate images. I thought that it improved my ability to produce the front cover. However I think that I will be able to improve my skills with Quark. I would like to be able to link the two programmes together to create the best music magazine that I will be able to. Overall I am more pleased with my front cover, and I will work with my contents page for the main task. I think the images that I took for the contents page could have been improved, and the subject matter. However in general I am happy with my preliminary task.