Preliminary school magazine research task.

For this task I have been asked to make a new modern school magazine, before I could do this I needed to carry out some research of existing products so that I could see what magazines are doing and what I need my magazine to have to have the basic layout. The following blog is what I found when i researched this.

Front cover of magazines.
The images set out on the front cover are usually there to entice the reader into looking at the magazine clearly and more in depth, by using a large picture this helps the reader get attracted to the magazine to read it. The George Stephenson magazine has used a range of different pictures linked to the school and the surrounding and merged them all together to form an optical illusion of the front cover, this gives a good effect as if they have the skill to create this in there magazines that the school must be of high authority and highly recommended. Chill however takes a different approach to the front page, they use small images of the schools events such as swimming and pyjama days, and this is to show the school as being fun and interesting with plenty of activities for the children within them.


The school usually uses their logo to make the school recognisable; this means that the school can be identified straight away by having its own unique logo. By using the school logo the pictures relate back to the school instead of having images of random objects that have nothing to do with their school.


The text is very bold and stands out on each magazine, this is all about trying to catch the reader’s eyes, and grab their attention. The text is usually used in imperatives to order the reader what to do, this makes the reader think that they had to do what the magazine was telling them to do. Also questions were used to leave the reader wanting to know the answers for example, ‘what’s next?’ and ‘what’s happening?’, this entices the reader into going into the magazine to find out. Also the font that is used is mainly used throughout the magazine as a running font and theme. This makes the magazine more unique and recognisable.


Contents page of magazines.
The colour scheme on the contents page was relatively the same as the front cover; this gave the magazine a running theme throughout for example the magazine I researched called ‘Chill’ had a red black and white colour scheme, I though this was a bad colour scheme as they are all very negative colours, giving the school a bad image. Some magazines such as ‘Bishop Briggs academy’ has no images on the contents page, this kept the page simple and easy to read with a good layout on the page, all of the text was on the left hand side in a simple format.


On one of the contents page that I had researched used dull colours, this wasn’t a very good colour to use as they reader may think that school has a negative image due to the use of dull colour.


I found that when I was looking at the contents pages of different magazines that they mainly kept the same fonts as the front page had, meaning that they had the same font running through the magazine, this made the magazine recognisable and unique.

Also when I was on the contents page the only writing that was included was the information about where to find each page and what is on it. There were imperatives used in the title of the pages to grab the reader’s attention into wanting to find out the answer of the question. Some of the titles gave away what the article was about, this helped as the reader to decide if they would be interested in the article and which one they would like to pick from the list.

By using a page layout the reader can find the article they are looking for fast and easily, instead of having to flick through all of the pages to find the specific one.

All of the magazines used number of the page on the listing of articles, this is a basic format for a magazine as if there wasn’t any page number readers would get confused and wouldn’t be able to locate the page they were looking for. This is a quality all of the magazines had that I researched.