Preliminary Task

 For my preliminary task, I had to create my own magazine for the school which would include news about the the school. I begun the task by drawing out my initial designs of my front cover and contents page on plain A4 paper.  These are my initial sketches.

Front Cover Sketch

Contents Page Sketch

 After I drew my sketches and scanned them in, I then had a photo shoot for my magazine and chose the best and most professional photos to use in my magazine. Here are the photos that I used.

After I had my photos I then started to make my front cover on
Adobe Photoshop. For the masthead of my magazine I used the text tool and placed it at the top of my cover, I used the 'Impact' font for my masthead and this font is much like the typical text used for magazines. I chose the name as Haydon Today as it is a news magazine for the school. I chose the colour scheme of blue and yellow as they are apparent in the school buildings and stag. I used the rectangle tool to create a blue rectangle below the masthead of the magazine, I then input the text 'Haydon Student Wins Spelling Bee', since this is the feature article of the magazine I made it more bold and eye catching than the other sell lines. Below the feature sell line on the left and right, I input two more sell lines using the text tool. I then put my front cover image onto photoshop by opening the photo and dragging it onto my front cover in photoshop. I then resized the image to fit around my masthead and sell lines. I duplicated the blue rectangle at the top of my page and place the duplicate at the bottom on the cover. I used the text tool to input text informing the reader of the competition and exam tips inside.   




For my contents page I initially planned to stay with my colour scheme of blue and yellow, however because I had no background image, the yellow text I used didn't show up of the page very clearly so I had to change the colour yellow to black in order to make it visible. I used the text tool to create the word 'contents' at the top of my page. I kept that part of the contents page blue so it still fit with my original colour scheme. I created sub headings for the articles in my magazine, I split up the pages into; 'feature', 'news' and 'extra'. With the text tool I also created all the page listings. To make them visible, I changed them all to black. I input some images on my contents page by opening them and dragging them onto to the page. I resized them accordingly and placed appropriate page numbers on the two images. Using the shape tool I created a white rectangle and placed it behind one of my photos, I then put some drop shadow on the shape. This makes the picture pop a bit more and makes it a little less boring. By putting the drop shadow on the image, it created the look of the picture being on a Polaroid.

This is a video of all the layers of my Preliminary task magazine being put on, this is to illustrate how I made the magazine and how it came together