Online Diary

This is my online diary for all of my coursework tasks, this is where I will update changes on all of my magazines and in other posts I will also include images and annotations of some of the influences that have affected my decisions. All other blogs will relate to certain points in my coursework book, however this is the only one that is simply a running commentary on all my actions throughout the tasks.


18th of January
First Lesson Began research on the magazine industry online, to eventually add the information into our work books. By researching magazines this will give us an idea of the styles to use in our own magazines.

Second Lesson Research continued focusing on school magazines. We looked at several existing magazines and analysed how they were good and bad, also taking note of the way the magazines are presented in this particular genre.

19th of January
Today we started to take photo's around the school to try and find a front cover picture to use as a magazine. Our images included shots from classrooms, corridors and the gym.

21st of January

Today I began printing images and text for my book, including task summaries and the title page. I then began to write a list of all the pages I intend to include in my book.

25th of January
Today I chose the final images I intended to use for my School magazine, and began to edit these photos to make them more suitable for a magazine cover. I edited two photos for the main image, and then chose seperate smaller images for around the cover showing other issues.

1st of February
First Lesson Today i began to construct my magazine cover, by laying out my seperate images and text.
Second Lesson By the end of the second lesson I had printed my final school magazine cover, after printing a draft and adding corrections. I then began to start the contents page.

2cnd of February
Today I began the design of my contents page, I've started with the background and inserting a title onto publisher.



4th of February
Today I finished the contents page, however I wasn't pleased with a lot of the print outs, as I think I made a mistake with the type of image arrangement I chose.
After redoing the images on publisher I finally finished the contents and printed it.



Today (4th of February) I therefore finished the preliminary task of creating a school magazine front cover and double page spread. I think i completed the task well, leaving a good amount of time to do the main task of a music magazine. I will first write an evaluation of the preliminary task which will be shown in my coursework book.



8th of February
After finishing my preliminary task, I now began the research for the music magazine task.



22nd of February
After finishing the research for my music task, I designed a questionnaire and asked 20 people to complete it, in this lesson I then typed up the results of the questionnaire and analysed the answers. I put the results into my coursework book.



24th of February
Today i continued with my music magazine research by annotating two existing music magazine covers, these included Q magazine and NME, I then put the annotations and covers into my blue coursework book.

29th February
During February half term I arranged for a model to pose as an artist to be on the front cover of my music magazine, today I began to sort through the images and chose my favourite 35. After this I then edited a few that I thought were suitable to be on my music magazine front cover.

1st March
In today's lesson I began to use the image for my cover, to design my cover. I entered area's for font and positioned a rough layout to how i wanted it.
At home during the week I then finished the front cover, although after completing it once I did adjust some of the font as it was too near the bottom of the page and was being cut off by the printer.

13/14th March
This weekend I started and completed my contents page for my music magazine. It contained all the stories that are on the front cover of my magazine, with a few extras. I modelled my contents page on the NME contents page that is inserted and analysed in my coursework book. I found it easy to do the contents page, however after completing it I decided it looked slightly bland. This also happened in the preliminary task to my contents page, so this time I decided to fix it. I added red stripes to the background, and yellow text boxes around the page numbers to give the page some more colour.

21st March
Today I began my first page of my double page spread.

22nd March
Today I continued doing my first page of the double page spread, I'm now typing out the intervew before inserting it onto publisher.
At home I then continued to finish the first page of my double page spread, although depending on the second page, I may add to it later.

24th March
Today I began my second page of my double page spread, however did not complete it.

30th of March
I have now completed my double page spread, and printed it. I have put this in my book and will annotate all my final spreads next lesson.

I have now completed all the work for my book, except for the evaluation which I will add in. This is the end of my online diary for the lead up of creating my magazine.