For the prelim task i believed that, and I will openly admit this, that I didnt take it seriously. The effect on the cover was a fluke that came about by playing around with the contrast and saturation of the picture, by happy coincidence it turned out well. There was not a lot of planning or thought behind it and it shows, quite obviously. The lack of taglines and general "thrown together" look makes it seem very unprofessional. Its the same with the contents, the lack of stories and pictures as well as framing show only a basic knowledge of magazines layouts.
Now
Well, immediately a more in depth knowledge of the layout of magazines is seen from the off. An obvious masthead containing issue number and price can be seen as well as a nicely placed barcode. The pulls and tag-lines are a lot more thought out as well as the layout, more interesting stories pull the readers in and the differing fonts for the bands help maintain the readers attention. The model is very stoic and captivates the reader by creating eye contact.
Although i did not use many new skills on the front cover I like to think that I definitely improved on the skills i already had, for example i'm a lot better at using the lasso tool and feathering the image as well as changing the colours of certain images and texts. Again a massive improvement in the contents page is seen, the photos are now clearly framed and referenced making finding the pages on which they are a lot easier and quicker to find. There are more stories, laid out in much more logical order with varying article types, a few peeves i have are that the contents masthead has a black bar that goes over the rest making it look untidy, and under the artist "Tibbz" there is a white space where i forgot to clone tool his body so there was no white space underneath. The framing of the text "features" and "every month" and the articles in that part mean that the text is nicely broken up and so it means the reader won't get bored to quickly and lose interest.
The double page spread is where i think i let myself down. The layout is probably the most annoying part about it, all the text on one side and the image on the other, this goes against all the conventions of all the magazines i looked at, it makes it a tedious task to read and people will more than likely lose interest a halfway through. Another thing is that i forgot to change the colour of the logo on his shirt to match the front cover so it changes which could be a bit confusing, although saying that i do like the desaturation of the image and the slight colour tinge of blue, it makes the image more "moody" which is a typical thing conveyed by most house artists.
If i was gonna do this whole thing over, i'd probably distribute my time a lot more equally. I spent long on the cover and by the time i came to edit the contents and DPS i had barely any time left. I'd put more pictures on the contents and have more stories because at the moment it lacks enough to make it seem like a "real" magazine. As for the DPS, id change most of it. another one or two pictures, spread the text out more, lose the introducing and shift the picture. Another thing would be to get the full Hi-res versions of the photos because to me they seem a bit blurry.
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