I have gathered research in the form of a moodboard, which then helped me to create a layout template, come up with title ideas and colour schemes for my preliminary task which is to design a college magazine.
For my moodboard, I collected pictures from Google Images which generally caught my attention and I found visually appealing and arranged them on a publisher document. Doing this began to show a general theme with the kinds of images I was picking out and I was beginning to see similarities in fonts, colour schemes and layouts. Some images, such as those of the college logo and the building itself, were put in there as I wanted to see how these might work with the general 'contemporary' theme if I were to include them later.
I began with the 'College' magazine images in the bottom right-hand corner. This was a good place to start as it showed some existing products which worked, looked appealing and I could use as a guideline later on. However, I found the search for college magazines difficult as there were not a wide variety of existing products to choose from, nor very many that I liked.
I then moved on to searching for other magazine covers which I liked the appearance of. These were generally fashion magazines as they had the medium close-up shots and serif headers which I liked the look of, as well as light and bright colour schemes. I broadened the search for fonts by finding ones that I liked and putting these on my moodboard. Most of the fonts I have included are the titles of the fonts themselves, so I can easily search for them later and download them to use. I saw that the general pattern with the fonts I picked were serif-style fonts, with a small kerning and usually quite thin. I thought that the more 'bolder' fonts I included would look good as headers, as it would attract the viewers attention.
Then, I started thinking about the main image on my magazine. I already knew I wanted a single student rather than a group as the main image, possibly holding books. I dedicated the top right-hand corner of my moodboard to collecting images of students. From the images I picked, there seemed to be a general theme with female students (as I found that images of male students standing alone holding books seemed to be limited) holding books in an outdoors environment. The backgrounds are usually very blurred (short depth of field) or a solid colour, so I will take pictures with both in order to see which works best on my magazine cover. There are, however, a couple of images of students with laptops, and I particularly liked the one of the girl on the laptop taken from above as the high angle is quite unusual, however the more landscape appearance of this image may make putting it onto a portrait magazine cover difficult. When it comes to taking the photographs for my magazine cover, I will be sure to try out both the books and laptop as props, and both the outdoors and studio-like backgrounds.
Lastly, I looked for contents page covers in order to collect ideas for mine. I have concluded from the image research I gathered that I will have a white background, with a large title (possibly the title of the magazine) and multiple images on the page. I will try to keep it looking quite clean and minimalistic in order to make it easy to navigate when looking for pages, and the colour scheme will match that of the cover page.
After finishing my moodboard, I designed a front cover and contents template for my magazine in order to get an idea of where I wanted everything to be placed. From my conventions analysis, I decided that I wanted to include a skyline, footer and plug on my cover even though they are not particularly necessary, as I think it will balance out the appearance more and make it more eye-catching. As for the contents page, I wanted to centre the contents list as well as the title as I think that this helps in creating symmetry and making it look cleaner. These layouts are only a guideline for how I may want my magazine to look, as I may decide against including features such as a secondary picture on the cover as it might not work with the main image, or make it look too cluttered.
Then, I came up with some ideas for college magazine names and contents page ideas, and then used some of the pictures I had collected and displayed on my moodboard to come up with some colour schemes for my magazine. I can see that the general pattern with the colour schemes include blacks, greys and whites along with either bold or pastel colours in predominantly pinks, blues and greens. Although my decision on none of these are final, I found it was helpful to lay out my ideas and display them this way for future reference.
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