Preliminary Task: Rough Draft

Below our pictures of what I would like my school magazine to roughly look like, I have included a student in  mid-shot and essential features such as page numbers, titles and dates etc.

Front Cover

Contents Page

School Magazine Collage

In our class today we were set a task to create a collage all about school to give us some ideas for our preliminary task, in which we have to design the front cover, contents and main article of a school magazine. I picked images of the different subjects you would most likely find in a school magazine like school plays, art pieces, exams and news from different members of staff. I have inserted my collage below. The other half of the lesson was spent analyzing different contents pages looking at how many images were used and how there tended to be a larger image for the main article with smaller images scattered around it. This helped me to think about how mine will be laid out and what sort of pictures I want to use in my piece.

Ruislip Eye Analysis

For homework I have been looking at the school magazine 'Ruislip Eye'.
This magazine has many similarities to magazines such as 'Heat' and 'The National Enquirer', for example it sticks to specific house colours which represent the school and it's house colours.
It also has a variety of pictures with different camera shots used in them, however these are poorly edited and not very clear.
The only article shown clearly is the main one, the others are written very small going down the column, unlike the other magazines which show a variety of the featured articles in their magazines in different fonts, colours and sizes.
It is also set up more like a newspaper than a magazine, with the full article written at the front in columns.
The background is also very boring and does not seem very appealing. 
Although a positive would be that it does have essentials such as the date (no price as it is free).
But overall, I wouldn't say it was anywhere near the standards of other magazines such as 'Closer' and 'Vogue' etc.

My National Enquirer

My First

This is my first blog on media studies, today I analysed the cover of 'National Enquirer', this was the second magazine cover I have analysed the first was 'Closer' which we did as a group, when we analysed 'Closer' we annotated the cover, labeling it with different features like the cluster of three. However when I analysed 'National Enquirer' I did this piece by myself using a system invented by McMahon and Quinn. 
This system uses three different codes: Technical, Written and Symbolic. I wrote this information into a table.