Evaluation of magazine design template

Self evaluation of design layout:

The following template cover was created by myself and Sasha, who I will be working with throughout this task. Our design has incorporated some features of real school magazines however, it has been developed to make it more current and stand out from the others. This will hopefully generate a larger target audience including students as well as the parents. We have done this with the masthead, using vertical text to make it different from previous magazines, this challenges conventions.

     Furthermore, our design includes more photos to make the cover more eye catching and again  to make it more relevant to students as it avoids having too much text. However, we have tried to keep a good balance by still having some text, this will hopefully make sure we still have interest from parents with information on what they want to read. We have decided that the text will be about the schools new uniform to demonstrate creating a good first impression and having pride in their learning.

    Moreover, the research has helped us in designing this cover as we've been able to identify the norms from it and use it to our advantage in making ours unique  compared to the others we've seen. 

Peer evaluation: 

We were also asked to get feedback about our design from our peers. It included many successful comments about the masthead standing out from the rest as it is original and different from others they had seen. They also commented on the idea of knowing instantly the target audience included students as well from the modern layout. 

      However, some unsuccessful points were also mentioned, this included the page being overcrowded with text. They thought that it looked more like a contents page and there needed to be more space in order for the unique features that will attract attention to stand out. 

         From hearing this it has made us look over our design more closely, making us realise that we have tried to include too much on the cover page. We plan to make a few changes in order to make it more spaced out and may consider a new story that will hopefully be more appealing to both target audiences as it was another comment made by our peers. This was a useful task as it meant that unsuccessful parts that we had not noticed were picked up on, which overall meant improvements could be made.