Other School Magazine Examples

Okay, so here's the start of the research that's been done towards making my own school magazine front cover. After a brief search on Google images, I managed to find a few school magazine covers - all with their own pros and cons... so I took it upon myself to denotate and connotate a few of them - checking out the mistakes of others so i don't run into them and maybe steal one or two of their better ideas! Here are some of the better ones....

 First things first. The magazine cover to the left here has quite good composition: the writing fits with the shape of the image, not overlapping or obstructing anything important. My only niggle with that is that she's a bit too far down and right. It leaves a lot of unnecessary empty space that needs filling, especially above her head. The font is fun and eye catching, but not particularly easy to read. 

Another problem is the lack of information. Yes, it has some of the contents advertised on the right, it has a masthead and it has a date and issue number, but there's no price, no ear to draw attention.

 'ASHFIELD!' Managed to vanquish that final problem, with the "Free Pencil!!" at the top right hand corner. Although it is there, it's not as eye catching as an ear should be, it should draw in readers with an odd shape, or a bright colour, then draw them in further with the offer it shows. This doesn't do that. It's a plain black font in a GREY CIRCLE. It's not interesting!

But then, the rest of it isn't much better. The most part of the cover is black and white, and the boy in the main article, although not black and white is dimly lit and wearing a grey shirt. It's not nearly bright or vividly coloured to contrast with the background and therefore doesn't stand out.

It could also be improved if they had more detail on the writing on the left...

This one has the structure next to perfect. A brilliant use of normal and bold fonts as well as the beeline at the bottom of the page.


My only nag with this is the use of colour. Although the use of contrasting colours (white and black) does really well to accentuate the font, the colours used are very monotonous. There's no bright colours that are going to stand out if you put this in a newspaper stand (not that a school newspaper would be on a stand?) and make the viewers think "WOW! What is this?"








Fantastic. This has everything. An unorthodox and eye catching layout covered with a mix of coloured geometric shapes, easy to read fonts and an interesting composition. It also has a decent amount of info about the contents.


Back to the colours. It has the fantastically bright red that'll catch your eye as well as the bright blue hoody which contrasts completely with all the shadows - which give the cover article a really moody, mysterious atmosphere, which perhaps represents the tone of the music made by the subject. It also makes you wonder why it's so mysterious and make you want to read it, perhaps? I do. The bad bit about the vast amounts of contrast is that you can barely see the subjects face, meaning if you were a fan of him, you may not recognise him ... and that would be one less magazine sale...


My first thoughts on seeing this was "this looks really professional". It made a great first impression. It has nice, easy to read fonts, a good use of light and dark colours for eye catching contrast (towards the bottom) and a beeline with a special offer, which is always a bonus.


On reviewing, I noticed that the bar code is on the top right hand corner. This is not a good move. 9/10 people in the UK are right handed, meaning if they are flicking through a stack of magazines, the top right corner would naturally be the one they flick and peek at. It's not eye-catching, it's not offering you anything to win or do (unless you have a bar code scanner on you...?) - you wouldn't think twice about chucking it on the "uninteresting" pile. Not helping this is the fact that the rest of that corner is just a plain, empty, grey space.


The beeline also needs a bit of filling up, maybe even by simply spreading out the words a little bit...?


I think I have a few ideas of what to do now :)