Magazine Cover Reflection

Introduction 

Last week in AICE Media Studies we learned about magazine conventions and began working on our own magazine covers. I found our lesson on the conventions quite interesting because I’ve never paid such close attention to the details in magazines like plugs or how different sized cover lines are meant to draw readers attention to the main story’s of the magazine.

Process

For my magazine I decided to make it a travel magazine because I love traveling and my family does it often. I used a picture I took on my last vacation to Mexico, the picture was taken on the plane ride there out the window of the plane. I used that picture and trip as the inspiration for the rest of my magazine.

My plugs consisted of what I would imagen to be popular travel headlines, catchy titles like "Get The Most Out of Your Vacation" and "5 Star Hotels", I also put plugs in different fonts to make a contrast between them since they are right next to each other. Similarly, I tried to make my coverlines interesting, one way I did this was by making one of my coverlines a question, I worded it as " What Will Your Next Adventure Be?". I also added a barcode, date, price, and banner to make my magazine more authentic by following the usual conventions of a magazine.

Challenges 

While working on my cover it was initially difficult because I am new to Adobe InDesign and it is a bit different then Adobe Acrobat but once I watched some tutorial videos provided to me by my teacher, I got the hang of it. One specific thing I was originally struggling with was changing the font colors for my coverlines but I continued to mess around with the setting and I figured out how to acquire the color wheel. As for the fonts I used, that part was easy to find and use, the other parts like my barcode and cover image were also easily completed so I found the most difficult part of this to be figuring out the new app and the brainstorm process or more specifically picking a cover image.

Conclusion 

I believe that thanks to this experience, the creation of my next magazine will go much smoother and hopefully next time I will be able to create a more immersive magazine. That is also why I believe that this will help me with my portfolio project since practice makes perfect.