Preliminary Task- Front Cover and Contents

For my preliminary task I needed to design a front cover and contents page for a students magazine. I made these documents in Microsoft Publisher.

This is my original attempt at creating a front cover:

Using a large main image of an adequate quality was a good point however to improve I could have edited out the background to make it look more professional. Using different fonts and colours for every bit of text makes it confusing to the reader, it is good to change them slightly but not so much all at once. There are grammatical mistakes made which would put people off from buying the magazine as if there are mistakes on the cover it is more likely to be poorly written inside which can be frustrating for a reader.

I have included key conventions of a magazine such as a main image, masthead, barcode and coverline which can be improved to make a good layout for my main task if I choose.

This is my original attempt at creating a contents page:

In the page index column, the text should be edited so words are on one line, possibly by reducing the size of the text or starting a new line. The layout is rather simple and plain which could be improved by adding more images, making the page more colourful and improving the style of the pieces of text. I could be more creative with how I position each part on the page. There are also some grammatical errors in what is written which creates a poor reputation for the writer's literary abilities. When I choose my images for this page, I will make sure they are relevant and edited well as in this preliminary task I used the original image without any editing. I will keep the idea of the column stating which stories will be on each page, having 'Contents' at the top of the page to direct the reader to know what it is and the image with a caption underneath.