Georginas Evaulation Blog

This is my finished magazine front cover. In these few paragraphs i am going to evaluate my piece and explain why i did what i did.

The Colour.

As i did my magazine first, i choose the colour blue as it is a unisex colour, and i feel it didn't contrast to much with the other colours to much from the picture. Since choosing the background colour blue i made the stars a different shade of blue - this is so they don't stand out to much but at the same time they are noticeable. At the bottom of my magazine there is the text which says ' The Colour of The Month is BLUE', I did this because i thought as it is a children's magazine to make it more interesting i would change the colours of each magazine each time (however for my advanced production i only had to make the one magazine). This is because i think that children would enjoy it more if there were other colours on it but if the style stayed the same so it recognizable. Underneath the image there is a blue thick line which is also on the DVD front cover, this has many reasons why. One being that for being able to remember the magazine by the front page each time, and the second reason is that as my image was from clip art on word the image was slightly slanted one way - to even this out i changed it so that it looks like the monkey is sat on a wall.

Colour with Extra Features

The stars on the magazine are to make it more exciting and to stop it being so plain. Also i put the stars there for the 'fun edge' of the magazine. As the main background colour is a gradient of two different shades i made sure that the stars were the same colour the whole time as i didn't really want to change the colours as i thought it would distract away from the actual characters and the text. Through out the magazine and the DVD colour i have kept the title text and the stars in roughly the same place, this is because it can be recognized by children and adults. The stars which are behind the title are placed to highlight the title to make it stand out more, this is also done by the gradient, as you can only see the stars a little bit and as your eyes go further down the cover towards the text the stars are allot stronger as the background it darker.

On the 'wall' underneath the main character there is five stars at the end in the colour of the other stars. Originally i had only three little blue stars on the stripe but after thinking about it and what i could do with it i changed it to five stars as i thought that through my work i could portray my magazine as the connotation of being five stars (similarly in the same way it is done within a film). I thought this would be a good idea to do it shows that i have thought about what could make my magazine cover better than it already is.

The Text

As briefly mentioned above about main text, the colour stands out from the background. I decided to put the text on a slant to catch your eye and make it more exciting, i think this works well. From doing a magazine for my AS level preliminary texts i have learnt a lot about magazines and where to place things, so this helped a lot with the texts this year. From last year i had learnt where to put the main title. Originally i had the title lower down towards the bottom of the magazine but after last year i had learnt that the title needs to be towards the top of the magazine other wise if it is stacked up in a shop of other magazines on a rack the title won't get seen if its behind another. So from learning this i have placed the title towards the top left corner so even if there is a small gap between magazines you would be able to see a little bit.

Through out my advanced production i have studied lots of children's magazines and programmes - mostly being those of ceebbies. This is because ceebbies is around a lot and is a typical example. From looking at these i had realised that i need to produce a sign or symbol which shows that my magazine/programme appears on this. For example: Balamory is a ceebbies programme which on all its DVD covers it has the ceebbies symbol so parents know its linked. So for this i created a simple sign which is in the top right hand corner which is three bright coloured triangles and 'Kids TV!' in text over the top.

The rest of the text on the front of my magazine is placed all over to give it more of a relaxed feel. Seeing as my actual advanced production is meant to be a 'children's TV drama' i had to make sure that when i wrote 'main' stories on the front cover they had to be drama based as well as still relevant to children. For the drama element of my magazine front cover i had stories such as ' Micky's first day of school' and ' the magical jungle'. When i wrote the titles for my dramas i didn't want them to be too ahead of there time - for example I didn't want the stories to be able anything which wasn't relevant to them at there age. As well as the drama element on my magazines i didn't want to get rid of the fact it was still a children's magazine so i still wanted in incorporate things which children would enjoy - like making things, so this is how i came up with the idea of 'mothers day card'.

The Main Picture

The main picture on my magazine is of a monkey which is from clip art on windows. I will touch upon this image within the magazine and the DVD cover as i have use the image on both of these. The main reason why i choose this character as i have influence from other children's programmes such as peppa pig, 64 zoo lane,sesame st and in the night garden. Many children's programmes have animals in them which is why i choose a monkey. I got the image off of clip art as i thought this would make it easy to access. The image of the monkey looks friendly and happy which is very important within a children's programme.

Overall Evaluation

Overall i feel that my magazine front cover went well. The difficulty i had with this part of my advanced production was that i felt that my magazine would look to plain as i didn't want to over fill it with things as it is only for children but also at the same time i didn't want it to look like i hadn't put any effort of time into it. So from this i wanted to create the right type of magazine which is relevant to each thing i want to cover.

After seeing the final product of my magazine i am extremely happy. Even though this is only one part of the whole thing i feel that the magazine is a strong part as well as everything else. I took a lot of time to make sure that it was all in the right place and it was similar to any other children's magazines. As i mentioned earlier i wanted the magazine to look as if i took the time and effort on it but it still be simple as it was only for children. If i had the time to go back and change anything to make it better with the magazine i don't think i would change a lot as i feel that this is the strongest it would get!