I used the search engine Google to begin looking for other school magazines as it's probably the easiest and quickest way to find a wide variety of covers from anywhere in the world. I used the image search first just searching for 'school magazine' and clicked on one from a school called St. Louises Comprehensive College in Belfast.
Their cover is as follows;
Upon first looking at it, it is clearly a very basic design. It has a plain main colour with a simple layout and not much imagination has gone into the creation of it. It has dreary colours and fonts that dont really tell you much about the school from a glance. It appears that it comes across as quite a bland and boring school and wouldn't be an exaple of what I would put onto my school front cover. The only possible thing I could consider using is the way the colour scheme works together and the writing clearly stands out from the background.
I continued searching and decided to find an example from outside of the UK and looked at Harvard Univeristy's magazine as it's a high up and well known university.
You can tell immediately that their magazine is extremely professional. They use a high quality image, edited well and photographed well, and probably taken by a student that attends the univeristy. The font colour for the title matches the colour of the lizard but still stands out from the background. The font also connotates the feeling of sophistication and high class - which is what Harvard is renound for. This is a skill id like to apply to my school magazine to make it look as real as possible and not just something anybody could make on Microsoft Publisher.
My third and final example was taken from an Australian university magazine which is the Univeristy of Melbourne.
This magazine also looks very professional as the Harvard one did, but differs in many ways. This cover uses a much less colourful main picture as its black and white, but compensates for it by putting a colourful banner underneath the magazine title and subheadings. Its title cleverly highlights the letters 'our' in 'Melbourne' which makes it sound like everybodies included in the making of the magazine. They have also created a logo for the university which is used next to the title but isn't very prominant.
Overall these covers have given me some good ideas of what i should put onto my school from cover but i probably won't make one upto the sophisticated standard of the major universities.
Now that I have looked into the conventions of other magazines I can begin planning my own.
Firstly, the most important feature of it would probably be the name. I went through a few ideas but ended up chosing the simplest one of them all "Monkey News" knowing many of the younger less mentally privileged students we have wouldn't question the contents of the magazine and they would clearly realise that the word 'Monkey' being short for Monkseaton and the word 'News' obviously is there because the magazine will be filled with breaking news about the school.
As for the story lines I decided to definitely include something about the brand new school that is currently being built and mention something about its progress on the front cover. Also I would put in a headline to go with my main picture I had already taken which was a slightly mug shot looking photo of a male student at the school. I thought I'd probably put some high profile scandal story to get readers attracted as theres nothing people love more than a juicy bit of gossip about someone they may know as a friend, acquaintance or student. I thought another good idea for a story would be something to do with the head teacher Dr. Kelley as everyone is familiar with him and yet again would be interested in a story involving him.
After gathering some ideas for the story lines I decided I needed to chose the colour scheme but I thought rather than just include my own opinion and ideas I wanted to make a questionnaire asking other peoples preferences about the colour scheme, story lines and the layout of the magazine.
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