Preliminary: Initial Front Cover Ideas

Planning my front cover, I have taken into consideration the results of my questionnaire.
From the data I collected, I know for definite that:

• The magazine will be aimed at older students (Yr10+) and will discuss both relevant social issues and academic matters
• The front cover image will not be an overly-formal photo, like a school picture, but more informal and therefore welcoming and engaging to the reader.
• Content should include information about courses and jobs; listings of local events; students opinions about the school and social issues through interviews and pupil-written articles

From this, I think that the chief article, the one with greatest prominence on the front cover and relating to the front cover photo, should be about an article written by a budding journalist within the school (who just so happens to be my model from the practice photo shoot and the only one of my friends willing to pose) about her career aim.
I took some more photographs for this cover idea, but as it is the same model, I may go back to my initial photos. I tried to make the photos informal and more personal to the reader, but still incorporating the studious nature of the article. I don't think this came across very well but when I create the cover, I'll test them out and see if they're effective.
New photos (yet to be edited or manipulated):

For the other headings on the page, I want to have a range of social and academic articles so I have chosen from the most popular results in the questionnaire. Graphs: [here] and [here]
 The options with the highest results were: tips on finding a job/choosing the right course for you; local event listings and relevant reading material for courses - I will chose three of these as stories for the front cover and try to create short, straight to the point titles for them so that their headings do not clog up the front cover.
Other things I have considered:

•  The masthead of the magazine will naturally be the biggest text on the front cover and will give a clear idea of the target audience of the magazine and its purpose

• I was thinking of including a header to the magazine - only a thin strip of text, nothing too big - with some information about the magazine (possibly date, issue number?) and the school logo just to clarify the school the magazine is representing
• In terms of fonts, I think that they should not be too unbearably 'down with the kids' as the magazine is aimed at the upper school, and this will not attract them as it would the lower school. Personally, I also think it looks unprofessional to have fonts like Comic Sans on a magazine cover. I will use a sans-serif font like Arial, Verdana or Trebuchet for the main text as it will be easy to read and a contrasting font such as Times New Roman or Courier for titles or the masthead, as these will be larger so will be easy to read even if a serif font is used. For the masthead, I may use a one-off font (from the internet?) but it wouldn't match up with the rest of the house-style so I'd have to pick it carefully for it to be effective.
• As I will be using very everyday fonts, I plan to make the magazine 'young' through the colour scheme. I am going to play about with different colours in DTP to see which go best with the front cover photo (the top result from the questionnaire about colour scheme was to alter it to incorporate colours from the photo) and overall style of the magazine

My initial sketches are yet to scanned, but here are some plans I have made on the computer (click to view larger):

With this plan, I can see which photos look good on the cover and how I would need to reposition any coverlines by pasting the image over the photo in DTP. It's only a rough guide, but it gives me the general idea what the cover would look like with that photo.