Looking At Previous Students Work.

What did I do?
As part of my research and planning I looked over the students work from the year before me, by doing this I would hopefully get a better idea of what I want to do in terms of setting out my magazine and how I would want it to look from another persons point of view. I looked over and reviewed 5 other students magazines. When looking at each magazine I was asked to identify its strengths, weaknesses, the grade I would of awarded the piece of work and the reason why.

My review of the students work.
When identifying the strengths I found that I was complimenting the magazines variation of fonts, and text sizes, which I think might be helpful when I design my magazine as I want the page to have a mixture of sizes, to avoid the page looking flat and boring. As well as the variation of fonts and sizes I noticed that the models positions on each front cover really set the whole front page off, this is because it was the first thing I would look at, therefore I know now that my image needs to be acceptable. When identifying weaknesses I tried to be as fair as possible and take into consideration the designers view of how they would of wanted the magazine to look, and I carefully picked out elements of the magazine that would need improving just to make the magazine look more dynamic and well put together. A common problem I found was that there was spelling and grammar mistakes, this is why I need to be extremely careful and look over my work numerous time to prevent this happening. Another common weakness was there was too much writing on some of the double page spreads which caused the page to look cramped and over crowded which I feel put me off reading the articles as they looked far to big and would take a long time to read.When I gave each magazine a grade I looked at the marking scheme and tried my best to fit each work to the grade that I thought the piece of work was worthy of, therefore 2 out of 5 received a grade D, because they had too many spelling mistakes, the images weren't very well edited, the contents pages were messy and didn't include the typical contents page conventions. I gave another 2 out of 5 a grade C because they their articles were good but there was some spelling mistakes and the editing of each images was very poor. The final piece of work received a grade B because the amount of colors and images was very good however the photos weren't edited very well.

What have I learnt?
By looking at other students work I have learnt ways I can use different fonts and text sizes to improve the appearance of my magazine. I also learnt how to use different types of images for example posed images and more natural/casual looking images of my model. By having a variation I can use more casual images in my double page spread and contents page and then have a more posed image on the front cover. I've also being given an idea of how I want my work to be set out and how I don't want it to be set out based on the other students work I now have an idea of what looks good and what doesn't. After looking at one of the students work I also learnt that too much writing on a double page spread just looks far too messy and over crowded, which is not what I  want, I want my magazines to look very simple and easy to ready, and not too frightening to the reader as I feel like too much text can be slightly intimidating to the audience as its overwhelming.