Preliminary Task. Frontpage

This was the the front cover i designed in the preliminary task, overall I do not think that it was very successful. Firstly I feel that the layout of the text e.g. titles and sub titles was not the best, and the colours used in the design made it look boring and plain.

Colours

I used the colour red to highlight all of the text, the font used for the subtitles was made different to the main title ' Goffs Gossip' this may confuse the reader as the main title font gives the impression of and old fashioned magazine, whereas the font used for the sub titles made the magazine look modern. The red text allow sub titles to stand out on the background of the main image, but red text for the title on the blue banner at the top of the page does not stand out very well and therefore would not catch of audiences eye.

Image

The main image of the front cover of the model walking out with a computer, this is quite a basic and plain image as it has not been edited in any way, this makes it look very boring and the audience would  probably not be very interested in reading any further than the front cover, however some people may be a little bit interested to continue reading as the image gives the impression of crime, and the audience may find this funny or shocking. As the image is of the most of the model's body, it will not catch the reader's eye as the distance between the camera and the model is too much. Another problem is that it is not clear that what the model is holding is a Mac as his body is almost fully turned away from the camera and is blocking the reader's view of he object. 

Another problem is that the two smaller images are different sizes and look out of place, they blend in too much with the background of the main image

Titles

The text on the cover was not typed or designed very well, the most outstanding problem would be the fact that the main title for the main story is the same size font as the sub stories, so the reader would not be able to easily tell which of the stories that is being mentioned on the front page is the one that the magazine is going to be focusing on.

The size, style and layout of the text is quite poor and would therefore not stand out on the shelf in a shop. There aren't many sub stories displayed on the cover, so the public won't have a clear idea of all the things the magazine will consist of. The red highlighted text is not easily readable on this background. 

Design

The overall design of the page is quite poor, there are some areas of the page that have not been utilized properly e.g. there are two banners at the top of the page, one which is blue and contains the magazine name inside, the red banner underneath does not contain any text or images and is therefore just taking up space for the sake of it. 

The pieces of text are positioned in poor areas, they are not in any sort of column and again taking up areas of space where other pieces of information or other images could go.