Preliminary Task- Research into existing covers

I began my research into existing school/college/university magazine covers by browsing Google Images for covers which fit the criteria of the one I would have to create, and some that were a bit different. I found 2 issues of Latino University magazine (September 2007 and November 2007) which were similar to what I needed to create, but also I found the Spring 2008 issue of the University of Waterloo magazine (Waterloo) which was quite unconventional of a university magazine. I decided to analyse it briefly as I thought it was a prime example of a modern magazine cover and to help me decide if an unconventional style would work.

Firstly I noticed the clear and simple font used all over the cover including the masthead, mostly in white, which gave it a very clean-cut feel as if it wasn’t trying to hide anything with gimmicky, over the top fonts. However, I thought this wasn’t necessary of a school magazine as because it was a university magazine, there was more pressure for it to look professional and academic. I personally thought it didn’t really appeal to students by using such a plain font, therefore I decided to use a more attractive font on my own cover, plus high school students are younger than university students and would probably appreciate a more unusual font.

In the cover lines there are a lot of references to academia, like “academic”, “maths” and “history”, which again I thought wouldn’t really appeal to a student if they were reading it for leisure means. However it would advertise the school well and possibly manipulate students to be more academic.

The whole cover of the magazine is a drawing, in a very individual crosshatch style, which gives it a contemporary feel, yet still conservative. The actual drawing involves a magpie on top of some books surrounded by a lot of metal objects which the magpie has assumedly collected. This again adds to the academic feel as it suggests a visual metaphor for a student succeeding in university (like the magpie is on top of the chemistry and engineering books), and then making money (the magpie collecting shiny objects). On the other hand, this is a risky picture to use, as although what has been encoded has a clever meaning behind it, it could easily make an aberrant reading when the reader doesn't understand the use of a magpie, therefore causing confusion and uncomfortableness. This shows that it is a loosely motivated sign, so would have countless amounts of opinions and connotations to different people. This makes me want to use a much more motivated picture, with less interpretations and more anchorage.

After analysing this rather different cover, I decided to stick to a typical style of cover as I think it would be much more effective in a high school and attract the attention of many more students.In class, we analysed 2 more university magazine covers, Concordia University Magazine and Angelo State University Magazine to broaden our knowledge of what we should be doing on our cover.