Preliminary Exercise - School Magazine!

Your blog needs to include at least the following information. You can structure it however you like in as many blog posts as you like as long as it is easy to navigate and well ordered.

Presentation of Research and Planning: 20 marks

Construction: 60 marks

Evaluation: 20 marks

Introduction to your blog

Introduction to Magazine Conventions including analysis of Typography, Colours, Mode of address - There is information on the resource blog or you can easily find articles on google.

Min 2 school mag front cover annotations & 2 Contents pages - ensure you use appropriate media language. It is also good practice to locate school/college magazines from a range of different sources e.g. different editions of own school/college magazine and other local schools should not be too difficult to find before online secondary research.

Audiences & Audience Theory Intro, Research & Planning

Title/Theme/Sketch for your magazine - Write an intro to why you chose this and include at least 3 alternative titles/ideas. Then include a rough hand drawn version that you can scan and upload to your blog.

Questionnaire and analysis of results - Identify and record (with justification in your Blog) the target audience of School/College Magazines (pupils/students, parents and guardians, local employers and businesses).

Ensure the questionnaire has a visually interesting design and does not use a pre existing template (try and avoid using Word).

Include open and closed questions e.g. closed = “how many times a year do you think a school/college magazine should be published?” Open = “comment on my front cover images, what does it tell you about the college?”

Submit electronically via social network links your early sketches and ideas (link your Blog to Facebook etc.), plus your Questionnaire - send to a sample 10 of your target audience as evidence of primary research.

Collate the responses on your Blog.

Analyse the results graphically using a graph on Excel for quantitative responses and as a summary paragraph for qualitative results 

Include one blank Questionnaire in your Blog.

Intro, Research and Planning for location & student Photoshoot - 

Organise a photo shoot and undertake original photography of students in different locations in and around your school/college – good Smartphone cameras will be enough for this early task but digital stills cameras are preferable and must be used for the main task.

10-15 photographs will be sufficient and again the images need to be uploaded and included in your Blog research and planning portfolio.

Make time for a ‘show and tell’ session with recorded feedback from your peers and students on the photo shoot: choose the images you will be using from this feedback.

The final picture for the cover must be a student, framed centrally in medium close up while you may use other smaller images for the cover and contents page.

Again, upload ALL the images and feedback in your Blog.

Second Sketch/Design for front cover - Develop further your front Cover flat plan and flat plan of your Contents Page.

Design an appropriate masthead – experiment with using different fonts and those from websites like www.dafont.com.

Add cover lines, additional images and background appropriate to the images and layout.

Include the school/college’s mantra (their ethos in a sentence – e.g. “Where students come first”). 

Think about mode of address – how do you want to ‘speak’ to your target audience?

Ensure you also include the month/season of publication e.g. November or ‘Autumn’) and also convergent links to Twitter and Facebook, a website and the price (if sold).

Research & Design Contents - With the Contents Page remember there must be house style evident from the front cover – this can be achieved by using a similar colour palette, font, language code or choice of image.

Remember the conventions of a Contents Page differ from a Front Cover e.g. more text on a Contents Page with an approximately 50:50 ratio with the images.

Contents Pages have more inset images (between 3 and 5), sub-headings with listed contents (not too listy, think about design) with page numbers, variation in typography and graphics.

Your Front Cover may often be the selling point of a magazine but spend as much time on the design of the Contents Page.

Create Magazine

Evaluation

Evaluate your Construction using 6 Key Questions

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

What kind of media institution (publisher) might distribute your media product and why?

Who would be the audience for your media product?

How did you attract/address your audience?

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?